WordPress is awesome and quite easy to work with, but new users may find it a little confused at first. Don’t worry! Just take some time studying it and you will love your business with WordPress promptly. In this article, we will show you the most basic understanding of WordPress Categories and how to use them on your site.
What is a Category and a Child Category?
Category is a pre-defined taxonomy in WordPress. It is used to sort out and group content into different sections. Categories are quite useful on websites with multiple topic content.
WordPress requires at least one available category for it to work correctly, so you will see a default category named Uncategorized. When you publish a new post without filing it into any category, then it will automatically be allocated to that Uncategorized. You cannot delete the default category, but you can easily change its name. You can also assign a new default one at Settings > Writing > Default Post Category, providing that two or more categories exist.
Categories are a hierarchical taxonomy, which means that each category can have one or more child categories. A child category is usually utilized for a subtopic under a broader topic.
How to Add and Manage Categories
There are two ways to create a category – through the Categories page and through the post editor page while you write a post.
You can add a category directly from the Posts > Categories page. Give it a name, and an (optional) slug which is a URL friendly name in lowercase and can only have letters, hyphens and/or numbers. If that is a child category, you need to assign it to a parent category.
In fact, Category Name is the only required field for you to fill in when creating a new category. Others can be skipped. Don’t forget to click the Add New Category button as the last step.
You can also add a category in WordPress while writing a blog post. Simply click on the Add New Category link in the Categories meta box on the post editor screen.
From Posts > Categories page, hover your cursor to a specific category and you will find four options editing a category
Where to Display Categories
Categories can be displayed on the sidebar using a widget named Categories and on the navigation menu bar.
To show categories on the sidebar:
Go to Appearance > Widgets and drag and drop a Categories widget to the sidebar. This will display a dropdown of all your categories, except for ones with no posts filed under them.
To show categories on the navigation menu bar:
Go to Appearance > Menus and add selected categories to a specific menu.
How to Convert Categories to Tags
Categories, together with tags, are two default WordPress taxonomies that you can use to group and organize content in your website. Unlike categories which may cover a wide range of topics, tags focus on some specific topics only and are manually added at the end of a post. In other words, tags can be seen as keywords for topics discussed in a particular post.
WordPress makes it possible for you to convert categories to tags and vice versa with Categories and Tags Converter plugin. Following are steps to do.
- Find the Categories and Tags Converter plugin in Tools > Import.
- Click Install Now.
- Upon the plugin installation, click Run Importer.
- Choose categories you want to convert to tags, then click on Convert Categories to Tags button.
That is all fundamental understanding of WordPress Categories. We hope it’s helpful to you!
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