WordPress offers the option of sorting your content into tags and categories, which can be found in the right-hand sidebar when you edit or write a post. Categories and tags are very important for organizing the content on your website and for search engine optimization.
In this article, you will learn why you should add categories and tags to WordPress pages and how to do so.
What are categories and tags in WordPress?
Tags and categories are the two main ways of grouping content on a WordPress website. Simply put, categories are general labels, while tags are more specific and describe your blog post in more detail.
Categories in WordPress are the most general method of grouping content on a WordPress website. A category symbolizes a topic or group of topics that are related in some way.
Sometimes, a post on your website can belong to several categories at the same time. However, it is not advisable to assign more than 2-3 categories to a single post. The point is to organize your content neatly so that readers can easily access your content.
Tags are also useful if you want to identify a piece of content or text by specific keywords. The main difference between tags and categories is how you use them. In other words, categories are meant to indicate the genre of the post, while tags go much deeper and indicate the detail of what the post is talking about.
Why add categories and tags to pages?
Pages in WordPress are meant to help visitors by providing specific information or finding specific content on your website.
For a typical small website, you probably won’t have many pages apart from the basic ones like About Us, Homepage, Contact Us, Privacy Policy, etc. Most of the content on your site will be in the form of posts, so there is little need for page categories on a blog.
However, if your website is focused on business and you want to manage all things business-related, things get a lot more complicated. In most cases, you will have multiple sales pages to cover the different products and services of your business.
In these scenario, so creating a category for these pages can be a good idea. It’s also a good idea if you simply want to use pages instead of posts for your evergreen content, which some experts think is a better way to structure your website.
Understanding parent, child and sibling categories in WordPress
Categories and subcategories are another way you can use to sort your content and develop an appropriate, semantic and meaningful website structure.
Let’s say you’re creating a travel site for different destinations around the world. You may want users to be able to find articles using some filters as well. For example, you can add the United States and then publish articles for Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, etc.
In this case, you can use child categories. The United States would act as a parent category, and the cities can become child categories. It is important to note that a post published under a subcategory does not have to be published under the parent category.
For example, if you assign a post to New York City as a category, which is a subcategory of the United States category, you are free to choose whether your post should be filed under the subcategory or under both categories.
If you choose to place your post in the sub-category but not in the parent category, your post will only appear on the archive pages of the sub-category. This is useful if you want to avoid duplicate content, and it’s another good way to structure your website.
Adding categories & subcategories in WordPress
First, let’s look at how you can easily add a new category in WordPress. To do this, go to the Posts > Categories page on the sidebar of your WordPress dashboard.
Then, scroll to the bottom and use the “Add new category” button to add a new category of your choosing.
Now that you’ve added a new category to your website, we can look at the best way to apply those categories to your website pages.
Adding categories to Pages
By default, WordPress only assigns categories to Posts, not Pages. However, you can add category functionality to Pages using one of these methods:
The plugin method
For beginners, we recommend using the Pages with Category and Tag plugin to create custom post types. With the Pages with Category and Tag plugin, all you really have to do is install the plugin.
Once installed, if you look under your Pages within the WordPress dashboard, you’ll see the Categories option has appeared and is available to use, just like it is for posts. This is undoubtedly the easiest solution to this problem.
Manually adding categories to a custom post type
If you want to use categories for pages by adding the code in the “functions.php” file of your theme or a website-specific plugin, you will need the right code to do this. Add this to your functions.php file:
function add_categories_to_pages() {
register_taxonomy_for_object_type('category', 'page');
}
add_action('init', 'add_categories_to_pages');
After adding the code, if you go to Pages > Add New or edit an existing page, you should now see the Categories panel in the right sidebar.
Conclusion
Ultimately, tags and categories in WordPress are essential for organizing your site’s content and making sure your website is easy for readers to follow. That’s why it’s important that you take some time to create the right category and tag structure for your website.
For some people, that will be using Pages and categorizing them – and hopefully, this article has shown you just how easy it is to do.
