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What are WordPress Categories

What are WordPress categories? Categories are one of the default taxonomies in WordPress that helps with the organization and structure of posts. They offer helpful ways to group and sort related WordPress posts into different sections. Categories can help website visitors quickly identify what your site is about and the type of content you offer.

A category is a text label defined by a descriptive word or phrase to group a broad range of related posts. Using WordPress categories for your website can enhance its usability and accessibility by offering visitors an easy solution to find content.

Categories can also have subcategories that allow you to create a hierarchy of terms; a parent-child relationship. WordPress considers posts located in subcategories to be members of the parent categories. This means that child subcategories are more specific terms within a parent category.

For example, a website that writes book reviews may have a parent category named Fiction. Under Fiction, it could have Graphic Novels, Mystery & Crime, and Sci-Fi & Fantasy as child subcategories.

WordPress categories parent-child hierarchy

It is possible to assign multiple categories to a single post. For best practice, we recommend restricting posts to a single category. Having posts attached to more than one category can clutter the organization of your posts and potentially confuse readers. For additional grouping between posts, use WordPress tags.

For additional grouping between posts, use WordPress tags.

Having a good category structure can help visitors understand your website’s content and find topics of interest more easily.

WordPress categories also play a vital role in your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). Creating categories with rich keywords will help search engines understand your site’s content and generate better organic traffic over time.

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