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#12205 – Confirming my understanding of 4SEF URLs

Posted in ‘Pre-sale questions’

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Sunday, 01 February 2026 04:35 UTC

[email protected]

Happy New Year, Yannick!

You may recall I mentioned last year how I hoped 4SEF could help me migrate a couple of my websites from WordPress to Joomla.

I worked on the first of these last week. It's the simplest website, with 108 of my podcast episodes, with links to the episodes, insights, and show notes. As most listeners will access the episodes via their podcast apps, it just needs to look clean, so I've reproduced the look and feel of the live WordPress website in Joomla, while toning down the colours!

Live website: https://www.tallandtrueshortreads.com/

The main category for the podcast episodes is the season, Season One to Season Five. This doesn't appear in the URL when the episode is displayed on the WordPress site, for instance, Nick's Helper (Episode 108, 15 December 2025):

https://www.tallandtrueshortreads.com/nicks-helper/

However, as we know, on the Joomla website, where I've created an Episodes category to display all episodes, and Season One to Five subcategories, the URL looks like this on my staging/test website:

https://www.staging.rocher.com.au/episodes/season-five/nicks-helper

My understanding is that I can configure 4SEF to not include the categories in the URL, so once I've installed the extension, the URLs will look like:

https://www.staging.rocher.com.au/nicks-helper

But I assume this only affects articles and won't remove the category from a menu item's URL. By this I mean, if I select All Episodes on the live WordPress site, the URL looks like this:

https://www.tallandtrueshortreads.com/episodes/

And on my staging/test website it looks the same:

https://www.staging.rocher.com.au/episodes

I hope this makes sense. I just want to confirm my understanding of how 4SEF works before I commit to copying, pasting, and reformatting the 108 podcast episodes.

Regards, Robert Fairhead

Monday, 02 February 2026 08:22 UTC

wb_weeblr

My understanding is that I can configure 4SEF to not include the categories in the URL, so once I've installed the extension, the URLs will look like:

https://www.staging.rocher.com.au/nicks-helper

This is possible, although I recommend against it if you don't have to. In your case, as you are forced to maintain previous URLs, you indeed are forced to.

But I assume this only affects articles and won't remove the category from a menu item's URL. By this I mean, if I select All Episodes on the live WordPress site, the URL looks like this:

With 4SEF, the links are not influenced by the menu items (contrary to Joomla). So if your menu item is a link to a category, its URL will be that of the category, and not that of the menu item alias itself.

So if your category alias is "episodes", and it's a top level category, then all URLs to it (in a menu or elsewhere, in content), will always be /episodes.

And on my staging/test website it looks the same:

https://www.staging.rocher.com.au/episodes

This URL is absolutely not the same as on your WordPress website. https://www.staging.rocher.com.au/episodes is missing the trailing slash that you have on your WP site. This makes these 2 URLs entirely different and therefore, in search engines view, 2 entirely different pages.

As it happens however, 4SEF will generate URLs with a trailing slash for any category link and so you are covered.

Best regards,
Yannick Gaultier
https://weeblr.com | @weeblr

Monday, 02 February 2026 21:07 UTC

[email protected]

Hi Yannick,

Thanks for your response. Sorry, I should have spotted that these two URLs are different:

Live: https://www.tallandtrueshortreads.com/episodes/

Test: https://www.staging.rocher.com.au/episodes

Since installing 4SEO, I have tried to pay more attention to the trailing slashes on links - although not this time, obviously! Looking at other links on the live WordPress site, I see they all have trailing slashes, so it's good that 4SEF will fix this for me.

On your comment about the menu items, yes, Episodes in the main menu of the new Joomla site links to a Category Blog menu item for the top-level Episodes category, and its alias is episodes.

Under this menu item, there are Category Blog submenus that link to Season One, Season Two, Season Three, etc. subcategories. Again, their aliases are season-one, season-two, season-three, etc.

The top-level Episodes menu exists on the live WordPress site, but not the Season submenus (I handle the Seasons within the Episodes page and there are no separate URLs for them).

So, on the test site, if I select Episodes -> Season One, the URL for the Category Blog (without the trailing slash) looks like:

https://www.staging.rocher.com.au/episodes/season-one

If I select an episode from Season One, for instance, The Dark Web, the URL for the article looks like:

https://www.staging.rocher.com.au/episodes/season-one/the-dark-web

I'm hoping 4SEF will remove "episodes/season-one/" from the article URL, but not from the Category Blog menu item.

Regards, Robert

Tuesday, 03 February 2026 08:01 UTC

wb_weeblr

I'm hoping 4SEF will remove "episodes/season-one/" from the article URL, but not from the Category Blog menu item.

It will, that's a setting.

Best regards,
Yannick Gaultier
https://weeblr.com | @weeblr

Tuesday, 03 February 2026 10:43 UTC

[email protected]

Thanks, Yannick. I have another question about installing 4SEF and 4SEO on staging/test websites, but I'll raise that as a technical query after I purchase 4SEF tomorrow.

Regards, Robert

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