onlinefotka

Permalink Manager for WooCommerce by Onlinefotka gives you complete control over how your WooCommerce product and category URLs are structured — without editing theme files or touching WordPress core.
By default, WooCommerce forces ugly base slugs into every URL: <code>/product/your-product-name/</code> and <code>/product-category/electronics/</code>. These slugs waste characters, look unprofessional and hurt SEO by making URLs longer than they need to be. This plugin solves all of that.
<h4>Why clean URLs matter for SEO</h4>
Search engines prefer short, descriptive URLs. Every extra word in a URL path that adds no meaning — like <code>/product/</code> or <code>/product-category/</code> — is a word that dilutes the value of your actual keywords. Removing these base slugs typically results in:
<ul>
<li>Shorter, more shareable URLs</li>
<li>Better click-through rates from search results</li>
<li>Cleaner internal linking structure</li>
<li>Fewer 404 errors when products are linked without the base slug</li>
</ul>
<h4>Per-product custom URL</h4>
Need one specific product to have a completely different URL than your global setting? Open any product, scroll to the General tab of Product data, and fill in the Vlastná URL (OPM) field with any path you like (single segment or nested, e.g. <code>akcia/super-zlava</code>). This overrides the global URL mode for that one product only — leave it empty and the product keeps using whatever mode you have selected for the whole shop. Changing or clearing a custom URL automatically creates a 301 redirect from the old address.
<h4>Product URL modes</h4>
Choose exactly how your product URLs should look:
<ul>
<li>Default — keep the WooCommerce default <code>/product/your-product/</code> (no changes)</li>
<li>No base slug — remove <code>/product/</code> prefix → <code>/your-product/</code> (recommended)</li>
<li>Category + product — prepend primary category → <code>/electronics/your-product/</code></li>
<li>Full category hierarchy — include all parent categories → <code>/tech/electronics/your-product/</code></li>
</ul>
<h4>Category URL modes</h4>
Choose exactly how your category URLs should look:
<ul>
<li>Default — keep the WooCommerce default <code>/product-category/electronics/</code> (no changes)</li>
<li>No base slug — remove <code>/product-category/</code> prefix → <code>/electronics/</code> (recommended)</li>
<li>Full hierarchy — include parent categories without base → <code>/tech/electronics/</code></li>
<li>Custom base — replace <code>/product-category/</code> with your own prefix, e.g. <code>/shop/electronics/</code></li>
</ul>
<h4>SEO and redirect features</h4>
Changing URL structure on an existing shop can kill your rankings if not handled correctly. This plugin takes care of everything automatically:
<ul>
<li>Automatic 301 redirects — all old URLs are permanently redirected to the new canonical URL. Visitors and crawlers are never left on a dead link.</li>
<li>Trash redirect or 410 — when you move a product to trash, a notice on the Products list lets you redirect the old URL or mark it as permanently gone (HTTP 410) so search engines drop it from the index instead of retrying a dead link forever. Works without needing Yoast SEO Premium.</li>
<li>Canonical meta tags — fixes the <code>rel=canonical</code> tag in the <code><head></code> to point to the new URL structure, preventing duplicate content penalties.</li>
<li>Breadcrumb fix for Yoast SEO — updates Yoast breadcrumb trails to match the new URL structure.</li>
<li>Breadcrumb fix for RankMath — updates RankMath breadcrumb trails to match the new URL structure.</li>
<li>Primary category support — reads the primary category set in Yoast SEO or RankMath and uses it for URL generation and breadcrumb paths.</li>
<li>Product tag URL cleanup — removes the <code>/product-tag/</code> base slug from tag archive URLs.</li>
<li>Slug conflict detection — warns you when a product slug collides with an existing page, post or custom post type.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Diagnostic tools</h4>
A dedicated Diagnostics tab inside the plugin settings lets you:
<ul>
<li>See a live plugin status table — shows active URL mode, cache status, detected plugins (Yoast, RankMath, WPML), PHP version, WP version and WooCommerce version.</li>
<li>Use the built-in URL tester — enter any URL path and instantly see how the plugin resolves it, which rewrite rule matched and whether a redirect was triggered.</li>
<li>View the full list of active rewrite rules added by the plugin — useful for debugging conflicts with other plugins.</li>
<li>Flush rewrite rules and rebuild the slug cache with a single click.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Performance</h4>
<ul>
<li>Product slugs are cached in a WordPress transient (configurable TTL, default 1 hour) to avoid repeated database queries on every request.</li>
<li>Rewrite rules are registered only once on <code>init</code> and flushed only when settings change — no performance overhead on the front end.</li>
<li>No external HTTP requests, no tracking, no telemetry.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Developer notes</h4>
<ul>
<li>Clean PHP 7.4+ code with custom PSR-4 autoloader — no Composer required</li>
<li>Namespace <code>WCUM\</code> — no global function pollution</li>
<li>All settings stored in a single WordPress option as a serialized array</li>
<li>Activation hook flushes rewrite rules; deactivation hook restores WooCommerce defaults; uninstall hook removes all plugin data</li>
<li>Compatible with WooCommerce High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS)</li>
<li>Compatible with WPML and Polylang (basic multilingual support via standard WP rewrite API)</li>
</ul>

Permalink Manager for WooCommerce by Onlinefotka

Remove base slugs and create clean SEO-friendly product and category URLs for WooCommerce. Includes 301 redirects, canonical tags and breadcrumbs.

texttheater

NOTE: recent WordPress versions already properly transliterate umlauts if the 
site language is German. In that case, German Slugs is no longer needed.
While creating a post or page, WordPress automatically suggests a permalink. If 
your permalink structure contains the %postname% tag, then the title of your 
post or page will be used, simplified by conversion to lowercase, replacing 
spaces with hyphens, removing certain punctuation characters and removing 
diacritics from latin letters.
Thus, by default, ä is replaced with a, ö with o, ü with u and ß with s (similar 
for capital letters). For German, the conventional transliteration is ä to ae, ö 
to oe, ü to ue and ß to ss (sometimes sz in Austria, this is not yet supported). 
This plugin makes your WordPress apply the conventional transliteration.
I wrote this plugin because manually correcting WordPress’s suggestions is a 
considerable hassle, especially if you decide to change the title afterwards.
<h3>Support</h3>
If you have questions or suggestions, contact me at poststelle ät texttheater döt 
net.

German Slugs

German Slugs properly transliterates umlauts and the letter ß appearing in titles for slugs (i.e. for pretty permalinks).

Permalink Manager for WooCommerce by Onlinefotka vs German Slugs