How to Create a Category on Your WordPress Blog

In WordPress, a category is what you determine to be the main topic of a blog post. Through the use of categories, you can file your blog posts into topics, by subject. To improve your readers’ experiences in navigating through your blog, WordPress organizes posts by the categories you assign to them.

Visitors can click the categories they’re interested in to see the blog posts you’ve written on those particular topics. You should know ahead of time that the list of categories you set up is displayed on your blog in a few different places, including the following:

Body of the post: In most WordPress themes, you see the title followed by a statement such as Filed In: Category 1, Category 2. The reader can click the category name to go to a page that lists all the posts you’ve made in that particular category. You can assign a single post to more than one category.
Sidebar of your blog theme: You can place a full list of category titles in the sidebar. A reader can click any category and get taken to a page on your site that lists the posts you’ve made within that particular category.

Subcategories can further refine the main category topic by listing specific topics related to the main (parent) category.

As your blog grows in size and age, you continue adding new categories to further define and archivethe history of your blog posts. You aren’t limited in the number of categories and subcategories you can create in your blog.

Creating a new category is as easy as following these steps:

Click the down arrow to the right of the Posts menu, and then click the Categories link.

The Categories page opens.
The left side of the Categories page displays the Add a New Category section.

Create a new category on your blog.
Type the name of your new category in the Name text box.

Suppose that you want to create a category in which you file all your posts about the books you read. In the Name text box, type something like Books I Enjoy.
Type a name in the Slug text box.

The slug creates the link to the category page that lists all the posts you’ve made in this category. If you leave this field blank, WordPress automatically creates a slug based on the category name. If the category is Books I Enjoy, WordPress automatically creates a category slug like this: http://yourdomain.com/category/books-i-enjoy. If you want to shorten it, however, you can! Type books in the Category Slug text box, and the link to the category becomes this: http://yourdomain.com/category/books.
Choose the category’s parent from the Parent drop-down menu.

Choose None if you want this new category to be a parent (or top level) category. If you’d like this category to be a subcategory of another category, choose the category you want to be the parent of this one.
(Optional) Type a description of the category in the Description text box.

Some WordPress templates are set up to actually display the category description directly beneath the category name. Providing a description helps you to further define the category intent for your readers. The description can be as short or as long as you like.
Click the Add Category button.

That’s it! You’ve added a new category to your blog. Armed with this information, you can add an unlimited number of categories to your blog.

You can delete a category on your blog by hovering the pointer over the title of the category you want to delete. Then click the Delete link that appears below the category title.

Deleting a category doesn’t delete the posts and links in that category. Instead, posts in the deleted category are assigned to the Uncategorized category (or whatever you’ve named the default category).