How to Add Categories and Subcategories to WordPress

WPBeginner is all about helping beginners get a hang of WordPress. We thought we did enough by just explaining the six step guide to setting up and starting a WordPress, but our users reminded us that we need to cover the usability of WordPress as well. Thank you users, we appreciate the nudge that help us get in the right direction and help you.

One of the most important features in WordPress is organizing the posts with categories. This help your user find the content easily. Sometimes there are needs to even go through and add subcategories. In this article we will show you step by step tutorial on how you can add categories and subcategories to WordPress.

This tutorial is being written for WordPress 2.8.4, so the images we are using are for that admin panel.

How to Add a Category

There are few ways of adding a post category to WordPress. The most used way to add categories is by going to category menu. You can see that by clicking on Posts » Categories

You can leave the slug blank, unless you want a specific URL. For example, your category name is WordPress Plugins, so the slug by default would show, that is only if you are using the SEO Friendly URL structure, which we strongly recommend you do.

http://www.yoursite.com/category/wordpress-plugin/

But if you want to change the url, lets say you want the link to say wp-plugin, you can do so by adding the slug wp-plugin. Note you must not select a parent category because this is your top-level category.

Another quick way of adding category is adding it when you are writing a post. Often when you are writing an article, it might not fit some of your other categories, that is when this feature comes in handy. Note: Do not create category for every single post. Keep your category structure clean and only create categories if it is absolutely necessary.

Note: This method is only for convenience. This does not allow you to pick a slug, or add a description. So make sure before you publish any post under that category, you edit the slug if it needs to be edited and add a description.

Now you have created categories, but sometimes that is not enough in organizing a site. Specially when you are thinking about creating a huge site or even a magazine. For example, if you have a general technology blog and you talk about all different sort of products. It is wise to create subcategories for popular topics. For example, if you are talking about Apple, which is a main category, you can add a subcategory for iPhone. This way your blog is even more organized.

Here is how you can add a Sub-Category in WordPress.

Basically you are following all the steps from the main category except you now have the Parent category selected.

When you are using the SEO Friendly URL Structure and have the categories included in the URLs, then your post link would like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/maincategory/subcategory/your-post-title/

We strongly recommend you don’t go deeper than second level category because then it just gets messier.

If you want to convert a parent category into a subcategory later on as your blog grew this is what you should do. You need to go to your categories page by going to Posts » Categories and then you should bring your mouse to the category you want to edit. Then click the edit button.

Simply go to the page, and change the Parent from none to the category of your choice.

We hope this tutorial helped you add categories and subcategories for your blog. This is an essential part of your blog, so you must know how to do it right.