How to Enforce One Category Per Post in WordPress

Categories are a great way to organize your content and help visitors find what they’re looking for. However, at WPBeginner we’ve seen plenty of website owners fall into the trap of adding multiple categories to each post.

This can confuse readers and the search engines, and can even generate lots of unwanted, duplicate content.

Thankfully, there’s a simple way to enforce a one-category-per-post rule, even if you work with guest bloggers. In this article, we’ll share how you can enforce one category per post in WordPress.

Why Enforce One Category Per Post in WordPress?

Adding categories and subcategories in WordPress can help visitors find what they’re looking for on your website.

By default, WordPress allows you to add multiple categories to a single post.

However, using multiple categories can create duplicate content and can harm your SEO rankings.

Every time you create a category, WordPress automatically creates a page for that category. This page shows all the posts that are assigned to that category.

If you add multiple categories to a single post, then the post will appear on multiple category pages, creating duplicate content.

Even worse, some themes show the full post on the category page rather than displaying a post excerpt. As a result, your site may show the entire same post multiple times.

All of this is bad news for your search engine optimization.

Search engines such as Google don’t want to show duplicate content in its results, so your pages may not appear in relevant searches. For more on this topic, please see our guide on SEO best practices for sorting your content.

With that being said, you may want to enforce one category per post in WordPress.

How to Enforce One Category Per Post in WordPress

If you’re the only person working on your WordPress blog, then you can simply limit yourself to a single category per post. However, if you’ve added other authors to your site, then you may need to enforce one category per post.

You can do this by using the Select All Categories and Taxonomies plugin.

By default, users can add multiple categories to a post simply by checking the category’s box. This WordPress plugin replaces the default category checkboxes with radio buttons.

Since users can only select one radio button at a time, they can only add one category to a WordPress post.

First, you’ll need to install and activate the Select All Categories and Taxonomies plugin. For more details, please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, head over to Settings » Moove taxonomy buttons. You can then open the ‘Categories’ dropdown and click on ‘Radio button.’

While you’re here, you may also want to change the default category. This is the category that all your posts will be assigned, unless the post’s author selects a different category.

To set a default category, click to open the ‘Default’ dropdown. You can then choose any category from the dropdown menu.

Do you also want to enforce one tag per post in WordPress? To do this, simply open the ‘Tags’ dropdown and select ‘Radio button,’ exactly the same as you did with categories. You can even select a default tag, so that the plugin automatically tags your WordPress posts.

Once you’ve made these changes, click on the ‘Save Changes’ button.

Now, go ahead and open any post in the WordPress content editor, and then click to expand the ‘Categories’ section in the left-hand menu.

You’ll see that all the category checkboxes are now radio buttons.

Try selecting a few different categories in the right-hand menu, and you’ll see that you can only select a single category.

After making this change, you may want to further streamline how WordPress handles categories across your website. For example, you might merge multiple categories, or restrict authors to specific WordPress categories.

We hope this guide helped you learn how to enforce one category per post in WordPress. You may also want to learn how to set a maximum number of tags for WordPress posts, or check out our list of proven ways to make money online blogging with WordPress.

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