Categories in WordPress are a very convenient way to organize your posts. It makes a parent and child categories possible differently, by making a hierarchical arrangement of your posts. In addition to that one post can be placed in more than one category. This gives a lot of flexibility to show exactly the posts you want, exactly the way you want them in WordPress widgets, menus or directly in your WordPress theme.

How to create WordPress Categories?

Step 1: Access the Posts>>Categories page first, as shown in the below snapshot.

Step 2: You can create categories by clicking on the tab which is on the left side of the page. Fill in the category name, its slug (will be used in the category URLs), the category description and then press the Add New Category button. Let’s say here I have taken a new category named Family posts.

Step 3: Now since the new category in your WordPress is ready. Make a sub-category of the Family posts one named Nephews. Fill in a name and slug the way you did with the first category but this time select Family posts as a parent for the new category. Then, press Add New Category once more to save the new sub-category.

How to assign posts to categories?

Step 1: Once you are done with the category structure, you can add posts to categories. There are two ways to do this. The first one is where you can open a particular post (or write a new one) and place a checkbox in the category you want to assign it to.



Step 2: The second way is to bulk add posts to a category. To do this go to Posts>>All Posts. Then select the posts you want to add to a category, click on the Bulk Actions tab, select Edit and finally press the Apply button.



Step 3: Several new sections will be shown, allowing you to edit different settings of the selected posts. One of them will be the Categories section. Select the category you want to add those posts too and click on the Update button.

Step 4: Now, the posts which you have marked previously belong to the category you have chosen.

How to edit Categories?

Categories can be edited from Posts>>Categories screen, by moving your mouse to the category you want to edit and then clicking on Edit link. This will open a WordPress editor where you can change name, slug, add or remove a parent category, edit or add a description.

How to Delete Categories?

Categories can also be deleted from this screen. Deleting does not delete posts which are under it. Rather, if a post is not filed into any other categories, then WordPress would automatically file the post under the default category. You should keep in mind that you can not delete a default category.

To delete a default category you first need to assign the default status to some other category, then only you can delete it.