This is a fix of Top Level Categories plugin for Wordpress 3.1. and above.
As of April 2026, FV Top Level Categories is a WordPress permalink plugin with 20K+ active installations and a 4.4/5 rating from 23 reviews. It has been downloaded 248K+ times in total. Requires WordPress 3.2.1+ and PHP false+. Available on WordPress.org since 2011. Downloads are up 25% this week. Top alternative: Custom Post Type Permalinks.
This is a fix of Top Level Category plugin for WordPress 3.1. and further versions. It’s purpose is to provide the same behavior as the original plugin, but in new WordPress versions.
The Top Level Categories plugin allows you to remove the prefix before the URL to your category page. For example, instead of http://foliovision.com/category/work, you can use http://foliovision.com/work for the address of “work” category. WordPress doesn’t allow you to have a blank prefix for categories (they insert category/ before the name), this plugin works around that restriction.
This plugin works also if you have a permalink structure like %postname% or %category%/%postname% — this wasn’t possible in the original version. However, this feature might not work proper…
It works fine
Simple.
Light on code.
Easy to understand interface.
Handles redirects by itself.
Works immediately, without breaking anything else.
A delight to have discovered it.
I can recommend this to anyone wanting to remove the word, ‘category,’ from their WordPress URLs for child categories.
Does as labelled, removed /category/ from all my category links generated by WordPress, did not break pagination!
After some frustration trying to remove ‘category’ form WordPress URL slugs by other means, this solved the problem. Works with pagination in Avada 5.1.6.
If you run into pagination issues when using the:
/%category%/%postname%/
…Custom Permalink Structure, you will want this plugin!
| WordPress | 3.2.1+ requiredTested up to 6.8.5 |
| PHP | false+ required |
Tested with WordPress 5.3
Bugfix for AMP category URLs
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