why we cant use this older option?

Hey Abolfazl,

WooCommerce adds these permalink structures for SEO best practice and for WordPress to easily pin point what content type the site is trying to process.

Please refer to WooCommerce documentation: https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/blob/trunk/docs/quality-and-best-practices/removing-product-product-category-or-shop-from-the-url.md

Removing?/product/,?/product-category/, or?/shop/?from the URLs is not advisable due to the way WordPress resolves its URLs. It uses the?product-category?(or any other text for that matter) the base of an URL to detect that it is an URL leading to a product category. There are SEO plugins that allow you to remove this base, but that can lead to a number of problems with performance and duplicate URLs.

If you have a ranking URL with this setup, you may just do a 301 redirect from old URL to new URL structure, so that the SEO ranking will be maintained. Don’t forget to resubmit a sitemap in your Google Search Console to somehow expedite the recrawling process.

Kind regards,
Alje

i rebuild a site and that site category was like this

site.com/Product-cat1
site.com/Product-cat2
site.com/Product-cat3

if i use this feture thats distroyed my SEO

• This reply was modified 1 day, 23 hours ago by Abolfazl Edalati.

Hi there,

Thanks for the follow-up and for clarifying your situation.

I completely understand your concern — if your previous site had product category URLs like:

site.com/Product-cat1 site.com/Product-cat2 site.com/Product-cat3

And now WooCommerce requires the /product-category/ base, I can see how that change might impact your SEO, especially if those older URLs were already indexed by search engines or linked externally.Why this happens

As mentioned earlier, this is part of how WooCommerce handles product categories within WordPress to avoid potential conflicts with pages, posts, or other custom content types that might have similar slugs. This behavior is built into WooCommerce and WordPress’ permalink system for compatibility and structural reasons.Options to Mitigate SEO Impact

While WooCommerce itself doesn’t offer a built-in way to completely remove the product category base, there are a few steps you can take to protect your SEO:

1. 301 Redirects – Set up redirects from the old URLs to the new ones. This signals to search engines that the content has permanently moved and helps preserve your rankings.
2. Custom Permalinks Plugins – Some third-party plugins (like Permalink Manager Pro) may offer the option to remove the product-category base, but these kinds of changes can come with compatibility risks and are not officially supported by WooCommerce.
3. Review SEO Plugins – If you’re using an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO or Rank Math, these tools can sometimes help manage category permalinks more effectively, or at least assist with redirects.

Thank you