Time for another WordPress Wednesday! Weekly tips for new and established self-hosted WordPress users, designed to help you get the most out of your site from Sarah, a WordPress website developer.
How to Nest WordPress Categories & Pages
Have you ever wondered how people see to sometimes have nested categories on their blogs, or how they make sub menus in their main navigation bar? (If not I guess you can skip this post, but for anyone else, read on! :) )
Nesting your categories and pages is an easy way of creating sub-categories for your posts. Handy if you’re only going to write a few posts for that category, or if your original topic has been broken down into more topics since you first created it. They’re also helpful for your readers – they might not be interested in all tutorials for example, so we’ve added a WordPress sub category to break things down a little further.
WordPress calls them parent and child, but you might know them as nested topics or subcategories. Don’t worry – they’re all the same thing! :)
So, let’s start with Categories first. When you’re writing your post, you should see a categories section in the right sidebar. If you’ve got nested categories already, they’ll look like this:
If not, you should just see a straight list of your categories. If you want to add a new nested category, the steps are fairly simple.
First, click on the ‘ + Add New Category’ link, under your category list. Type in the title of the category you want to add, and then use the drop down box to select the ‘parent’ category (i.e. the one you want to list it under.)
Once you’ve done that just click on the ‘Add New Category’ button and you should see your new category at the top of the list, nested appropriately.
If you ever want to change the parent/child relationship of your categories, you can do that via the ‘categories’ menu in the dashboard sidebar (on the left), under the ‘All Posts’ heading :)
Bonus tip: you can also nest pages. This is useful for keeping things organised and for creating neat sub menus. You’ll find the option in the Page Attributes section in the right sidebar, just select which page you want for the parent and update your page – et voila! A nested page :)
I hope today’s tips have been helpful – leave a comment if you’ve got any WordPress queries you think I can help with :)
