How to Create a New WordPress Category

By Lisa Sabin-Wilson, Cory Miller, Kevin Palmer, Andrea Rennick, and Michael Torbert

As your WordPress blog grows in size and age, you can add new categories to define and archive the 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 easy:

Enlarge

Click Categories in the Posts drop-down list.

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

Enlarge

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 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 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 http://yourdomain.com/category/books.

Select the category’s parent from the Parent drop-down list.

Select None if you want this new category to be a parent (or top-level) category. If you want to make this category a subcategory of another category, select the category that 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 display the category description directly beneath the category name. Providing a description further defines the category intent for your readers. The description can be as short or as long as you want.

Click the Add New Category button.

That’s it! 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 your mouse pointer on the title of the category you want to delete, and then clicking 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 reassigned to the Uncategorized category (or whatever you’ve named the default category).

If you have an established WordPress blog that has categories already created, you can convert some or all of your categories to tags. To do so, look for the Category to Tag Converter link on the right side of the Category page in your WordPress Dashboard; click it to convert your categories to tags.