I checked out this article https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/removing-product-product-category-or-shop-from-the-urls/ which explains that it is not good to remove the product and category bases from the url because it will impact performance.

Instead of this, I did the following:

1. In woocommerce I did not set any page for the shop url so my shop page is considered the homepage

2. I have a custom made domain.com/shop/ as a page , which exports my design and products

3. In the permalink settings i have set the following:

   • Product category base: shop
   • product permalink: /shop/%product_cat%/

So in this way my links became the following:

• categories: domain.com/shop/category-name

• products: domain.com/shop/category-name/product name

I am satisfied with the “look” of this url structured because it makes sens to me and to a customer. the /shop/ page is crawlable too (as opposed to a normal prefix that does not exist ) because I created it and displays the products too

However the category pages now give a 404 error message, but the product pages work.
If anyone has a good recommendation on how to fix this issue that will not affect performance.
I am not entirely sure what kind of performance impact will it have if i remove the prefixes as explained in the woocommerce article i linked.

Is there a good fix to this ?

Thank you
Claudiu