WordPress has become the most popular content management system handling more than 40% of the total websites. All beginner WordPress users have a ton of questions regarding its working. The most common question among them is related to the categories and subcategories. Adding categories is one of the best ways to organize your content and also, it makes it easier to reach out to the interested and particular groups of people.
Let’s say a person came across your site for the first time and is ready to explore it. These categories will help him get clarity on the type of content he can expect from your site. Site navigation becomes much easier for him since there is no confusion left.
Why do you need to go through this guide? Because categories and subcategories are considered one of the major factors affecting the SEO of a website.
Why Do You Need Categories And Subcategories?
Firstly, it is essential to understand the importance of categories and subcategories. Let’s say you have a fashion blog wherein you create content related to women’s fashion. The categories like clothing, accessories, etc. will help your target audience in reaching relevant content.
Now, let’s say, you have an article that says about the best hair accessories. Would it be useful for the audience on your blog searching for heels? Not really, right? “Hair accessories” would be your subcategory to be more specific regarding the content in the article or blog.
Most eCommerce websites are confused about whether or not categories can be used for the products. If your eCommerce plugin permits, you can easily avail the benefits of categories and subcategories on your site.
Moreover, not just for the visitors, the categories and subcategories are also helpful for search engines. Since these terms will appear in your URL, indexing becomes much easier. Target the most relevant keywords to reach people with desired interests. As per your requirements, you can change or add the categories to the URLs. Go to the permalinks section to do the same.
Let’s go further to get acquainted with the steps you are required to follow for adding categories and subcategories to your posts.
Note: Categories and tags are not the same. Do not get confused.
Adding Categories To Your Content While Writing Or Editing Post
Step 1: Open the post that you want to add a category to.
Step 2: Once you open the post, look on the right-hand side. Under the Post column, you will notice “categories.” Click on it and you will notice a blue tick in front of “uncategorized.” This is because you haven’t created any category for the article before.
Step 3: Next, click on “Add new category” and you will come across two places to fill. The first is the name of your new category which should be a broad name describing your article content in the best possible manner. The Parent category dropdown needs to remain empty if this is a regular category.
Step 4: Click on add new category and you will notice that the created category will have a blue tick in front of it. Whenever you want to remove it, you can easily do that. As you can notice, our new category, growth hacking is available in the category dropdown.
Apart from adding categories while writing or editing your content, you can directly add it from the dashboard. You will see categories under the posts column, click on it, name your new category and select “Add new category”. The best thing about this is, there are no restrictions regarding the number of categories. You can create as many categories as you want.
Adding Subcategories To Your Content
Adding subcategories to your content is similar to adding categories. Let’s go through the steps that you need to follow:
Step 1: Open the post that you want to add a category to.
Step 2: Once you open the post, look on the right-hand side. Under the Post column, you will notice “categories.”Once you will click on it, you will observe a blue tick in front of “uncategorized.”
Step 3: Next, click on “Add new category” and you will come across two places to fill. The first is the name of your sub-category which should be a specific name describing your article content. After that, select your parent category from the categories created before. As you can see here, we have selected startups as a subcategory under “growth hacking”, the parent category.
Step 4: Click on add new category and you will notice that the newly created subcategory will have a blue tick in front of it.
Just like categories, you can add subcategories from the dashboard by clicking on categories under the post column. All that you need to do is instead of keeping the parent category option empty, select the one that you find suitable. This is it!
How To Display Categories And Subcategories On The Sidebar?
- Firstly, on the dashboard, click on Appearances and select widget from the dropdown menu
- Click on categories and you will notice all your categories displayed in alphabetical order
- From the available options, select “show hierarchy” to ensure the subcategories are visible along with the main categories.
- You will notice both categories visible on your site. If you still encounter any trouble, try clearing your WordPress cache.
In The End
Follow the above-mentioned steps and create categories and subcategories to make the tasks of your visitors and crawlers easier. According to your content requirement, create a number of categories. You can also go through the most-searched categories in your niche.
This will give you a better idea regarding your users’ searches. Make sure the ones that you create speaks for your content and give a brief about what the readers can expect. Thus, making the navigation easier. After all, while creating a website, your main aim should be to make it easier for your visitors.