{"id":4781,"date":"2022-06-03T11:23:58","date_gmt":"2022-06-03T08:23:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scalahosting.com\/kb\/?p=4781"},"modified":"2023-02-16T17:17:03","modified_gmt":"2023-02-16T15:17:03","slug":"how-to-use-wordpress-categories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scalahosting.com\/kb\/how-to-use-wordpress-categories\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Use WordPress Categories"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

WordPress is a <\/span>Content Management System<\/b><\/a> (or CMS), so one of its main purposes is to give you control over your posts and pages. <\/span>Categories are a significant part of all this<\/b>, and, as we’ll find out in a minute, they can be beneficial to your project in more ways than one.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let’s see how to make the most of them.<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Is a WordPress Category?<\/b><\/b><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A <\/span>WordPress category does exactly what you’d expect it to do<\/b> \u2013 it helps you organize your posts in groups according to what they are about. Say, for example, you have a blog where you post about things from both your professional and personal life.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your audience will find it much <\/span>easier to navigate the content<\/b> if the two are kept separate, so you want to put your work-related posts under one category and your personal stories in another. Every <\/span>category has its own URL<\/b>, so visitors can quickly get to the content they’re interested in.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are further options for organizing your posts. To continue with our example, we’ll say that your professional activities range from<\/span> testing different software solutions <\/b>to reporting news about the latest hardware innovations. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

With <\/span>WordPress<\/b><\/a>, you can have <\/span>child categories<\/b>, so your posts about a new generation of CPUs will be in a different place from your review of a new office suite. That way, visitors after a specific type of content will know where to look.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now that we’ve seen how categories work, it’s time to learn how to manage them.<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Creating and Managing WordPress Categories<\/b><\/b><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Out of the box, WordPress comes with one category labeled <\/span>Uncategorized<\/b>, which also acts as the default category (<\/span>all the posts you publish without specifying the category go to the default one<\/span><\/i>).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You probably want to change the default category from Uncategorized to something else, and you’ll likely want to remove the Uncategorized category altogether. <\/span>However, before you can do that, you need to create another category.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Log in to the WordPress dashboard and go to <\/span>Posts <\/b>> <\/span>Categories<\/b>. On the left, there’s a form you’ll need to fill in order to create a new category. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s what you see:<\/b><\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n