WordPress Categories
What WordPress categories are for, how they differ from website sections, and how to show, hide and delete them to organize your site's content.
Snell Rojas
I wrote this post in Spanish in 2021 and adapted it to English in 2026.
WordPress categories are very useful for organizing the content on your website.
In this post I'll talk about categories: what they are, what they're for, how you can use them, and a couple of tricks.
Ready for this?
What Are They, and What Are They For? #
WordPress categories are a kind of taxonomy used to organize the content on your website into a hierarchy.
A really good use (in SEO terms) is grouping content whose keywords are similar.
I go into that in more detail in this post:
As you can see, a WordPress category is very different from what people usually call a "website category".
What most people call that is really called "website sections". I'll explain this in detail, because I think it's important, to say the least.
The Difference Between Website Sections and WordPress Categories #
A website's sections are the topics it covers.
These topics can all fit a single niche. For example, on a dog website they'd be:
- Breeds
- Sizes
- Life stages
- Etc.
Or they can be different topics that belong to a common niche. For example, on an Amazon mega niche the sections would be:
- Kitchen
- Home
- Health
- Etc.
These topics have different keywords. Even if they share some terms, the truth is they're very different in the eyes of Big Brother (Google).
Like I said, categories are for organizing similar keywords and giving that group of keywords a hierarchy that tells Google which content on your website is most relevant.
To make it clearer: in the Amazon mega niche, inside the "kitchen" section, the categories would be:
Coffee makers (drip, Nespresso, etc.).
Blenders (hand, electric, etc.).
For the dog website example, inside the "breeds" section, the categories would be:
Retrievers (Labrador, golden, etc.)
Hounds (Beagle, Spanish hound, etc.).
So a section holds the posts related to a topic, and a category the ones related by keywords.
How Do You Show a Category's Posts on a WordPress Page? #
The first thing to do so a page shows up instead of the category archive is to go to Settings > Permalinks and, under "Category base", enter: /.
That way WordPress removes the category URLs, and you can show a page there just by creating it with the same slug the category had.
For example, if your category was "coffee-makers" and had this URL: rootdomain.com/category/coffee-makers
You'd create the page: rootdomain.com/coffee-makers
And that page ends up showing where the category used to be.
How do you add the posts to that page?
By hand...
Yep, adding URL after URL as links in the page's content.
A bit of a pain, right?
What can I tell you... That's how it is, heh.
Naaaah... of course there's a way to do it automatically, and that's with a plugin.
Which one do I recommend?
Elementor Pro.
With Elementor Pro and its "Posts" widget, you can show a category's posts on the page you created. But watch out, that comes at a price, and the price is pagination (which I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies in the SERPs).
WordPress Category Descriptions #
In Posts > Categories > Edit, you can add a description so each category has some text before the posts that belong to it.
Hide
If you don't want to show that text, you can just delete it: click "Edit", delete the category description, then click "Update".
Another way is to find the <div> that holds the category description, then go to WordPress Dashboard > Appearance > Customize > Additional CSS and give the class that styles the description div the property "display: none;", something like:
.category-description-styles {
display: none;
}
Those are the two least "invasive" ways to do it. Another way is to use, in your child theme, an archive.php (the file that "builds" the category pages) without the div that holds the description.
Since that depends on each theme, I'm not going to get tangled up explaining how to do it, heh.
IMPORTANT NOTE: ELEMENTOR
Another way: when you use Elementor to build the "archive" template that formats your category pages, don't include the dynamic text element that pulls each category's description (Dynamic content > Archive Description).
Show
Showing category descriptions depends on each theme.
It's not something you can do in a couple of clicks, because it depends directly on how your theme was coded.
If you have text describing your categories and it doesn't show up on their pages, it's because the theme doesn't support it.
So what's the fix?
Lean on the plugins that make life easier.
Which one do I use?
AdSensei hasn't let me down so far, and I think it's the easiest to set up (careful with this: I mean it from the heart, because Dean isn't paying me a dime for this recommendation, ha ha ha).
How Do You Delete Categories in WordPress? #
To delete a category, just go to Posts > Categories > Delete.
There's one category you can't delete: the one that comes by default when you install WordPress, called "Uncategorized". It's there to avoid little problems when you publish posts without saying which category they belong to.
