WooCommerce builds URLs from two settings and a permalink base, and the defaults produce longer paths than most stores want. The decision is worth making deliberately once, because changing it later means redirecting every product and category URL you have.
What WooCommerce does by default
- Products sit at
/product/product-name/. - Categories sit at
/product-category/category-name/. - Tags sit at
/product-tag/tag-name/. - The shop page is usually
/shop/.
All of these are configurable under Settings → Permalinks, in the product permalinks section.
Choosing a structure
Shorter is better, within reason
Removing /product/ and /product-category/ gives cleaner paths that read better in results and are easier to share. The SEO gain is small but real, and the usability gain is larger.
Do not nest categories into product URLs
WooCommerce offers an option to include the category in the product path. Avoid it. Products belonging to several categories then generate several URLs for one product, and moving a product between categories changes its address.
Keep product URLs flat and independent of category. The category structure lives in your navigation and breadcrumbs, which is where it belongs. See WooCommerce category structure.
Keep slugs short and stable
Use the product name, not the full title with specifications. A slug carrying size, colour and SKU is long, and it becomes wrong when any of those change.
Changing it on an existing store
This is a migration, not a settings change. Every product and category URL changes at once.
- Export every current URL before changing anything.
- Change the setting, then immediately crawl to capture the new URLs.
- Build a one-to-one redirect map from old to new. Never map everything to the shop page.
- Update internal links to the new URLs rather than relying on redirects.
- Regenerate and resubmit the sitemap.
Expect a period of instability while the new URLs are reprocessed. On an established store the cleaner URLs rarely justify this, so the honest answer is usually to leave it alone. See SEO migration.
The parts that cause real problems
- Tag archives left indexable, duplicating category listings.
- Attribute archives generating URLs nobody intended to publish.
- Parameter URLs from filtering and sorting, multiplying addresses for one listing. See URL parameters.
- Pagination that is blocked or canonicalised to page one. See pagination SEO.
These matter more than the permalink base does. A store with clean short URLs and thousands of indexable parameter variations has a much worse problem than one with /product/ in its paths.
Frequently asked questions
Should I remove /product/ from URLs?
On a new store, yes. On an established one, only with a full redirect map and a reason better than tidiness.
Does URL structure affect rankings?
Marginally. Relevance, content and links matter far more. URLs are worth getting right because they are cheap to set well at the start, not because they move rankings.
Should categories appear in product URLs?
No. It creates duplicate paths for multi-category products and breaks URLs when products are recategorised.
What about the shop page slug?
It rarely matters, because categories should be your landing pages rather than the shop page. See shop page SEO.
Consulting CTA
If you are planning a permalink change on a live store, book an SEO consultation before changing the setting.