How to Add 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.

Over the past 16 years, we have effectively organized our posts into categories and subcategories across all our websites to improve site navigation for our readers. This has improved our accessibility and contributed to higher search engine rankings by making our content more user-friendly.

In this article, we’ll show you how to easily 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.

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 the ‘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 block panel on the right-hand side, open up the Categories tab.

You will see different categories that you’ve already created.

However, to create a new category, you can simply click the ‘Add New Category’ link.

Once you click the link, two new boxes will appear where you can add your category.

For a regular category, you don’t need to select anything from the Parent Category dropdown.

Once you’ve typed in the name for your category, simply click the ‘Add New Category’ button.

The box for that category will then be automatically checked for your current post. You can uncheck it if you want.

You can also add a new category without editing a post.

Simply go to Posts » Categories and add your new category. This is handy if you want to create all your categories before adding content.

This method also lets you edit the slug (URL) for your categories. You can delete and rename categories and give them a description. See how to add SEO keywords and descriptions in WordPress.

Adding a Child Category (Sub Category) in WordPress

You can add and edit child categories in exactly the same way you added your parent categories.

When you’re editing a post, open the settings panel and scroll down to the Categories tab.

Next, click the ‘Add New Category’ option and type in the name of your child category. Then select the category that you want to use as the parent from the dropdown list.

Similarly, you can also go to Posts » Categories to add child categories.

Just type in the name of your child category and select the parent category from the dropdown menu.

Your child categories can also have their own child categories if you want.

For instance, we might decide to develop a category structure that is used to group multiple types of content together, like this:

Here, News is a category, with the Announcements as child categories.

Categories on the same level within a parent category are sometimes called ‘sibling’ categories. For instance, the Announcements and SEO Tools are sibling categories here.

Categories can only have one parent. You can’t add one sub-category under two different parent categories.

SEO Benefits of Category-Based Site Structure

Your category URLs will look something like this:

https://example.com/category/united-states/new-york-city/

This is meaningful and helps search engines and visitors understand what your page is about. You also get a chance to add keywords to your URL. Keywords help people find content on search engines.

WordPress also allows you to easily change the /category/ prefix of your category URLs. You can even remove it completely if you want.

Simply go to the Settings » Permalinks page from the WordPress admin panel and scroll down to the ‘Category base’ section.

Here you can enter the prefix you would like to use and click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your changes.

The ‘category’ prefix in your category URLs doesn’t add any benefit to your SEO.

This is why some website owners prefer to remove the word ‘category’ from their WordPress category archive pages’ URLs. You can easily do this by using the All in One SEO plugin, so your category URLs look like this:

http://example.com/united-states/new-york-city/

Simply go to the Search Appearance menu for AIOSEO and then select the Taxonomies tab. Under the Advanced settings for Categories, you will see the option to remove the category base prefix.

Alternatively, you can also use the FV Top Level Categories plugin. Simply install the plugin and it will remove the word ‘category’ from your category archive pages’ URLs.

Important: If you decide to change the category base on an existing WordPress site, then you’ll need to set up redirects to avoid 404 errors for search engine visitors. For more detailed instructions, please follow our guide on how to change the category base prefix in WordPress.

How to Display Categories and Child Categories in WordPress Sidebar

You can add a widget block to your WordPress sidebar or footer to show a list of categories. In your WordPress dashboard, go to Appearance » Widgets.

If you haven’t changed your widgets from the ones that WordPress puts there by default, you should see the Categories widget block already in place. If not, then you can click the ‘+’ button and add a ‘Category’ block to your widget area.

By default, the widget will show all your categories in a flat list, in alphabetical order.

Here’s a preview of how they looked on our test website:

Tip: Categories will only display on the list if you’ve assigned at least 1 published post to them.

You can change it to show the child categories (subcategories) beneath their parent categories if you want. Simply enable the ‘Show hierarchy’ option in the widget settings like this. Don’t forget to click the ‘Update’ button.

On your site, you should now see your parent categories with the child categories nested beneath them.

Aside from the default category widget block, you can also create custom category menu links using the WordPress navigation menu. After that, you can add that menu to your header menu, sidebar, footer, or other menu locations.

Bonus: Display Subcategories on Category Pages in WordPress

Once you have added subcategories to your website, you can display them on your category pages. This will make it easier for users to navigate your content and may boost traffic.

To display subcategories, you must add the following custom code to your category.php file. You can find this folder in your theme files.

<?php
if (is_category()) {
    $this_category = get_category($cat);
    }
    ?>
    <?php
    if($this_category->category_parent)
    $this_category = wp_list_categories('orderby=id&show_count=0
    &title_li=&use_desc_for_title=1&child_of='.$this_category->category_parent.
    "&echo=0"); else
    $this_category = wp_list_categories('orderby=id&depth=1&show_count=0
    &title_li=&use_desc_for_title=1&child_of='.$this_category->cat_ID.
    "&echo=0");
    if ($this_category) { ?> 
  
<ul>
<?php echo $this_category; ?>
  
</ul>
  
<?php } ?>

Once you do that, just visit any category page on your website where you will notice a list of its subcategories that users can browse.

For details, see our tutorial on how to display subcategories on category pages in WordPress.

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to add categories and child categories in WordPress. You may also want to take a look at our article on how to create custom taxonomies in WordPress and our guide on how to add quicktags in WordPress comment forms.

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