What is a category in WordPress?

A category in WordPress is a broad topic you file your blog posts under. Every post on a WordPress blog sits in at least one category, and WordPress gives each category its own page that lists all the posts in it. Visitors who like one topic can then find every post about it without scrolling through the whole blog.

A bakery's blog at bramblequaybakes.co.uk might file its posts under Recipes, Baking tips and Shop news. A visitor who wants a bread recipe opens Recipes and skips the shop updates. Categories are one of the ways WordPress organises content out of the box.

How WordPress categories work

WordPress categories can sit inside each other. A category that has a parent category is a subcategory. On the bakery blog, Bread and Cakes could sit under Recipes as subcategories.

WordPress also has a default category. When you publish a post without picking a category, it goes into the default one, which a new WordPress site calls Uncategorised, or Uncategorized in US English, until you rename it. You choose which category is the default in your writing settings.

What a category page shows

A WordPress category page is what visitors see when they click a category link: a list of every post in that category. Its address comes from the category's slug, the short form of its name. With the slug recipes, the bakery's page would sit at an address like bramblequaybakes.co.uk/category/recipes/.

A parent category's page also shows the posts in its subcategories. On the bakery blog, the Recipes page lists the posts in Bread and Cakes too, while the Bread page lists only the bread posts.

Categories, tags and pages: what's the difference?

Categories sort your posts into a few broad topics. WordPress tags describe a single post in more detail. Your bread recipe might sit in the Recipes category and carry tags such as sourdough and no-knead. Tags have no hierarchy, and a post doesn't need any. As a rule of thumb, make a topic a category when you'll write about it again and again. Make it a tag when it only describes a detail of a few posts, such as an ingredient. Pages are different again. You use them for content outside the blog, such as About or Contact, and since categories organise posts, a page has no category by default.

How to add and manage categories in WordPress

Create your categories first, so they're ready to tick when you write a post.

1. Open the Categories screen under Posts in your WordPress dashboard.
2. Type a Name for the category. Each category name must be unique.
3. Add a Slug, the short version of the name that goes in the category's web address.
4. To make it a subcategory, pick its parent category from the Parent drop-down.
5. Add a Description. It's optional, and some themes show it on the category page while others don't.
6. Click Add New Category to save it.

To put a post in a category, open the post and find the list of categories in the settings sidebar of the editor. Tick the box next to the category the post belongs to, then save the post. You can add a new category from there too.

You can rename any category, the default one included, by editing it on the same Categories screen. If you delete a category, its posts are not deleted. Posts that were in no other category move to your default category, which cannot be deleted.

How to use categories in WordPress

Categories help visitors when the names make sense to them and the list stays tidy as the blog grows.

• Use your readers' words. Name each category the way your visitors would describe the topic: a bakery blog's readers look for Recipes, not Culinary content.
• Plan from your content. Base your categories on what you write about on your website or plan to write about soon, not on topics you only hope to cover.
• Add subcategories when a category grows. If one category fills up with very different posts, split it into subcategories under the same parent.
• Give the default category a real name. Rename Uncategorised to a topic such as Baking tips, so a post you forget to file lands under a label that tells readers something.
• Put your main categories in the menu. WordPress lets you add categories to your navigation menu, next to your pages, so visitors can go straight to a topic.

How many categories should you have?

Our advice: start with three to five broad categories, such as the bakery's Recipes, Baking tips and Shop news, and file each post in just one of them. A short list helps readers find a topic quickly. WordPress lets you tick more than one category, but filing each post once keeps related posts together instead of spreading them across the blog.

Do categories help your SEO?

Categories can help, mainly by giving your blog a clear structure. Google's SEO guide says that organising a site logically can make it easier for people and search engines to see how its pages fit together. The same guide says, though, that posts people find useful are likely to do more for your place in search than how you file them.

Leave out empty categories and pairs that mean the same thing, such as Recipes and Recipe ideas on the bakery blog. Keep each topic under one name, so all its posts sit on one category page.

Set up your blog's categories

Before your next post, sketch out three to five categories for your own blog and give the default one a real name. If you're starting a blog from scratch, you can build and run it yourself on our Hosting for WordPress.

Every Hosting for WordPress plan comes with a domain that's free for the first year on selected extensions, an SSL certificate and email on your own domain.