How to create categories and subcategories in WordPress?

Introduction

Categories are used to logically organize your posts based on similar characteristics or features. Careful organization of your content has a positive impact on the user experience, as users find it easier to navigate your site and find exactly what they're looking for.

In WordPress, you have full flexibility when working with categories. You can assign multiple posts to a category and display them as you like in your themes, menus and widgets.

In this tutorial, we'll take you step-by-step through the process of creating categories and subcategories and show you how to organize your content neatly and clearly.

Before we continue, we would like to mention one important detail. Categories and tags are often confused. Therefore, it is important to know the difference before you start developing your website.

Categories: Categories are used to group similar content according to certain criteria. In WordPress, you can create categories and subcategories to organize your content hierarchically.

Tags: Tags are used to uniquely describe posts. Unlike categories, tags can NOT be arranged hierarchically. You can think of them as indexes for your website's content.

Categories in WordPress

There are two general ways to create categories and subcategories in WordPress - through the Categories section and when creating new posts.

First, log in to your WordPress admin dashboard. Once you are logged in, use the menu bar on the left to navigate to Contributions > Categories.

You will then be redirected to the "Categories" section. On the left side you will find the form for creating categories. The table on the right lists all the categories that are currently available on your website. At this point, you will probably only see the "Uncategorized" category.

The category "Uncategorized" is created by WordPress. This is a default category that is needed and cannot be deleted. You can rename it or create another default category, but there must always be a category that serves as such. Any posts you add that are not assigned to a specific category will automatically be assigned to the default category.

Create categories

To better explain the hierarchical arrangement of categories, we will give you a simple example and show you how to create your categories and subcategories.

Let's say you run a blog about beverages. Then you probably have a category "Wines". Under that, you can nest "Red Wines", "White Wines", "Rarities", and so on. "Wines" is the top category, the rest are subcategories.

Create parent categories

To create a new category, please fill in the "Add new category" form.

Name: In this field, enter the name of the category. Note that this name represents the category in the front-end of your website, so make sure you use something relevant and understandable.

Title form: The title form is the part of the URL that defines the category page. It is the part of the URL that follows your domain name. Example: "yourdomain.com/wines". It is automatically generated based on the value you entered in the "Name" field. If you want to customize it, please make sure to use only lowercase letters and replace all spaces with hyphens (-). This serves the better SEO.

Parent category: Your selection here determines whether this is a parent or child category. In our case, "Wines" is the parent category, so we leave it at "None".

Description: This field is optional. If you want, you can enter a short description of the category and its specifications. Depending on the theme, the description may be displayed when visitors search your website for categories.

When you have entered all the required details, click the "Add New Category" button to complete the creation. Your new category is now added and ready to be assigned to your posts.

Create child categories (subcategories)

The procedure for creating subcategories is essentially the same. However, there is one important difference.

You need to enter "Name", "Slug" and "Description" again in the same way as described above. This time, however, you need to select from the "Parent Category" drop-down list the actual parent category under which this subcategory should be nested. In our case, this would be the "Wines" category we just created.

When you are done, click "Add New Category" to create your subcategory.

After both categories are created, they are displayed in the table on the right side. All the important category details are displayed in the corresponding rows - name, description, slug and count, which indicates how many posts are currently assigned to this category.

Congratulations! You have learned how to create categories. Now you can easily assign your posts to the right category and organize your website effectively. We hope that this information was useful for you.