Now you know how to install a WordPress blog and how to write your first blog post. Another most important thing to manage any WordPress blog is organizing your blog posts with categories so that you can easily display filter links and make it easy for your visitors to browse your website. Many a time it needs to go deep into a topic and create sub-categories. WordPress categories are the hierarchical taxonomies and hence you can easily create a tree type structure by adding categories and then their child categories and then more subcategories and so on. Here, in this tutorial we will explain you how to add categories and subcategories to your WordPress site.
How To Add A New Category In WordPress?
In general there are two ways of creating new categories. Quick way creating new categories is at the time of writing any post. You can create a new category from Add NEW/ EDIT post page using ‘Categories’ metabox present, clicking ‘+Add New Category‘ link then typing the category name and choosing its parent category from the dropdown (only if you are creating a subcategory).
Another way of creating new categories is navigating to Dashboard -> Posts -> Categories page and adding new category as shown below:
There are four fields:
- Name Field: Is for your category name which will appears on your website.
- Slug Field: It is the category name shows in the URL. It is usually all lowercase and contains only letters, numbers, and hyphens. You may leave it to empty if you don’t want a specific URL slug, default URL slug is generated from the category name.
- Parent Field: Categories can be added in a hierarchy. You might have a Music category, and under that have children categories for Jazz and Trance. This field is used for creating subcategories. When you choose a parent category, your category gets added as subcategory of the category you have selected.
- Description Field: You may describe the category you are adding. It is shown up on categories admin page table (Posts-> Categories).The description is not prominent on frontend by default but there are many themes that shows it.
Where, ‘Name’ is the required field and rest all others are optional. Finally, click ‘Add New Category‘ button and the category will be added. You can assign posts to your categories from add new & edit post screens using the ‘Categories‘ metabox.