Do you want to know how to create categories and subcategories in WordPress?
In WordPress, your posts can be organized into different categories and tags. You can even create subcategories for further organization. Using categories and subcategories can help your readers find the content they’re most interested in and improve your website’s SEO rankings.
In this article, we’ll show you how to add categories and subcategories in WordPress, step by step.
Understanding Parent and Child Categories in WordPress
Categories are a powerful tool. They’re not just a way to sort your content. They also help you develop a proper site structure that is meaningful and semantic. This is great for your WordPress SEO.
Note: If you’re not clear about the difference between categories and tags, take a look at our guide on categories vs tags. This explains why categories and tags are different, and how to use them correctly.
Now you might be wondering, why and when would someone need to use child categories (subcategories) on their WordPress website?
Let’s say you’re creating a travel blog for different destinations around the world. You might want users to be able to find articles by both country and city.
For example, you might have an article about the best waterparks in the United States. It would make sense to use ‘United States’ as the category for that post.
However, you might also have articles about the best places to eat in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and more. This is where you can use child or subcategories. Then ‘United States’ can become a parent category and the cities can become child categories.
A post filed under a child category doesn’t need to also be filed under the parent category. In our example, we could have left ‘United States’ unchecked and just put the post in the ‘New York City’ category.
If you file a post under the child category but not under the parent category, then your post will appear only on the archive pages of the child category.
Having said that, let’s take a look at how to add both regular categories and child categories in WordPress.
Adding a Category in WordPress
You can easily add a new category in WordPress when writing a post.
First, if the sidebar isn’t showing when you’re editing a post, you’ll need to click on the gear icon on the top right.
Then, in the Post panel on the right-hand side, open up the Categories tab.