How to Delete Categories on WordPress?

In this guide, I’m going to tell you how to add, edit, or delete categories on WordPress.

Not only that, but by the end of this article, you’ll also get to know about:

• • Why categories are important in WordPress
  • What happens when you delete a category
  • And, how you can manage them effectively

Categories help you divide your WordPress website/blog’s content into different parts.

For instance, if you were to have a digital marketing blog, you might divide your content into categories like email marketing, content marketing, SEO, and so on.

Let’s now see how to edit, add, and delete categories in WordPress. 

 

How to Edit, Add and Delete Categories in WordPress?

How to Add Categories in WordPress – For New Posts

To add a new category in WordPress while creating a post, simply go to “Posts” on the left panel of the WordPress dashboard and click “Add New”.

Source: WordPress

WordPress will then take you to a page where you can write your post. At the bottom right corner, look for the “Categories” section. You can either add this new post under an old category. WordPress shows all the categories in a list here.

Alternatively, you can add a new category and put this new post under that.

Source: WordPress

When you click on “Add New Category”, tell WordPress if you want the new category to be a sub-category of a previous (Parent category) or not.

Source: WordPress

If you want to create a separate category, ignore the parent category drop-down, name your category, and click on “Add New Category”.

 

Now, you’ve created a category while creating a new post in WordPress. What if you want to create a category without creating a new post?

Let’s see how you can do that.

Right under “Posts” on the left-hand side of your WordPress dashboard, you’ll see “Categories”.

WordPress will redirect you to the category page. Here, you can add your category. This could be under a parent category or a new one.

WordPress also allows you to create a description of your category helping users and search engines like Google understand them better.

Source: WordPress

If you want to create a new category under a parent category, you’d have to select a parent category. If not, skip this step.

Just add your new category name, slug, and description and click the “Add New Category” option. The slug is just a part of the URL. If you don’t put anything there, WordPress will create the category slug from the category name.

Categories help users navigate your site with ease. But, what if you end up creating too many of them? Thankfully, deleting categories in WordPress is simpler than creating them.

 

How to Delete Categories on WordPress?

So, how to delete categories in WordPress? Deleting a category in WordPress doesn’t require more than a couple of clicks.

Just go to “Categories” and click “Delete” under the category that you want to remove.

Source: WordPress

 

You may also need to delete multiple categories at a time. To do that, you’ll have to select the ones you want to remove and apply delete.

Source: WordPress

 

You’ve created a category and want to tweak it. What do you do then?

You can edit your WordPress categories with ease. Just go to the same old “Categories” on the left panel and click on “Edit” under the one you want to make changes to.

Source: WordPress

 

Another way to edit a category in WordPress is by using the “Quick Edit” option. However, you can only edit the name and slug of a category through this route.

The “quick edit” option doesn’t let you make tweaks to your category description.

 

Are Categories Important in WordPress?

Yes, otherwise, your visitors will have a tough time finding the posts they are looking for on your website.

Plus, maintaining a well-defined content structure helps in keeping your website easily crawlable for Google bots. This eventually helps in your website’s Google ranking.

However, it wouldn’t be practical or even helpful if you used categories when they don’t make sense. You should only use categories to make navigation of your site’s content easier.

 

What Happens if I Delete a Category in WordPress?

The most common question that people ask is “what will happen if I delete a category in WordPress?”. What happens to my posts if I delete a category?

Well, the good news is, deleting a category doesn’t affect your posts. When you delete a category, WordPress will shift all the posts that you published under that to the default category.

However, you can’t delete the default category in WordPress. You can change its name and slug though.

When you create your blog or website and write a post, it automatically goes under the default category. So, you don’t need to create categories in WordPress if you think you don’t need them.

 

How Do I Manage Categories in WordPress?

Categories tell the user and search engines what your content is about. So, when you write a post under a particular category, visitors can easily find it.

If your site is on a broad topic, you can use multiple sub-categories to structure your content effectively. Categories in WordPress are hierarchical in nature.

 

Difference Between Categories and Tags

As discussed earlier, categories are sections of your website based on content. Whereas, tags provide information about a post.

Tags generally represent the sub-topics that you talk about in a post. You can imagine categories as genres of your posts.

Let’s understand both with examples.

Say you are running a news site and covering everything from current affairs to sports. If your website is on WordPress, what you can do is, create different categories for sports, current affairs, weather, and so on.

On the other hand, say you are writing a fiction book review by Stephen King. There are several elements of that book that you’d want your readers (and search engines) to know about.

So, you include tags like “Fiction”, “Stephen King”, “Book name”, and so on. Another benefit of using tags is that if a user wants to read something related to a specific tag, they can do that by clicking on it.

 

Conclusion

WordPress categories allow you to keep your blog content well-structured and easy to navigate for your visitors.

Not only that, but WordPress categories also help search engines like Google understand the structure of your blog/website.

This can eventually lead to faster Google ranking as you make it easier for Google bots to crawl your webpages.

Maintaining categories in WordPress is as easy as it gets. You don’t need to do anything other than going to the category page under “Posts” in WordPress and add, remove, or edit them.

Deleting a category doesn’t affect your posts under it. The posts that you published under that category would just shift to the default category of WordPress. You can’t deletethe WordPress default category.