Wordpress and Woocommerce: remove /product and /product-category from URL structure

Question

Dear StackOverflow friends, in a site with Wordpress and Woocommerce plugin, I would like to change the URL of the pages of e-commerce in an SEO friendly structure and in particular I would like:

1) the individual product pages www.mysite.com/product/productname to become www.mysite.com/productname

2) and the product category pages www.mysite.com/product-category/categoryname to become www.mysite.com/categoryname

As regards the case 1 /product, I have not found a plugin that could help me and I tried

A- to modify WordPress permalinks: inserting a slash followed by a dot /. products , URL takes on the structure that I want but the pages are no longer accessible and bring me an error of 'redirection loop'

B- to modify the .htaccess file, adding the following lines of code

// 301 Redirect Entire Directory 
RedirectMatch http://testmywpshop.info/prodotto(.* 301) http://testmywpshop.info/$1 

but probably I have not written/inserted that code correctly, because the site becomes inaccessible!

As regards the case 2 about /product-category, I tried the plugin SEO Ultimate which has the function that suites my needs and I successfully converts the URL structure of product categories, but I'd prefer to get the same result without using it, because my friend wants to use SEO Yoast and there may be conflicts between these two plugins.

In conclusion, I wish URL wouldn't suffer broken links and redirections to be more acceptable to Google (maybe using the 301 redirection because it seems to be the only liked by robots) or even change the WordPress core code that determines the structure of the URL, but I have not been able to find it!

I read this Stack post and this Woocommerce documentation but I'd like to find an alternate way, if possible in your opinion.

I would also be happy to know your opinion about the usefulness of a modified URL structure, removing irrelevant words to the products sold in a e-commerce, to meet Google requirements (I found conflicting information about this subject).

Thanks for your advice and your help!

Answer 1

Its possible to change the url structure, use a plugin for this.

old situation: domain.com/product/blue-trouser

new situation: domain.com/blue-trouser

or with categories

old: domain.com/product-category/pants/blue-trouser

new: domain.com/pants/blue-trouser

You will have to buy a plugin to get it this way.

Answer 2

I would also be happy to know your opinion about the usefulness of a modified URL structure, removing irrelevant words to the products sold in a e-commerce, to meet Google requirements (I found conflicting information about this subject).

If you are looking to do this change to meet SEO Best Practices requirements, please note that this particular URL suggestion happened due to products that belong to multiple categories.

As such, urls that include categories can be detrimental.

www.example.com/product/drinks/milkshake and www.example.com/product/desserts/milkshake point to the same product. However, the problem here is not /product/ but /drinks/ and /milkshake/.

a WooCommerce site with a default product url like www.example.com/product/product-name is technically ok. I prefer to set my urls to www.example.com/shop/product-name as well as www.example.com/shop/category-main/category-sub/ as it is more descriptive. You can do this on WordPress Admin>Settings>Permalinks.

That said, if WooCommerce documentation says it's not a good idea, I usually don't pursue it. :)