Why do I have “category” in my permalinks?

Question

I added two category pages to a site I am working on and I found out the permalink in the url is wrong.

I set the permalink as /%category%/%postname% and I created two categories "News" and "Offers"

I was supposed to get mydomain.com/news or mydomain.com/offers (I created the category links using the built-in menu system) but I get this instead: mydomain.com/category/news and mydomain.com/category/offers

Why do I have "category" in the url? How can I remove it?

Thanks

Answer 1

By setting your permalinks to %category%/%postname%, you are setting the permalinks only for your posts and pages.

Below the posts and pages permalinks option is another one for your categories. Just set your categories slug to . and it will just be the category name. Here's a visual example:

Answer 2

You can also use the WP No Category Base plugin to remove it.