What is a Category?

Last modified: July 12, 2020

If you have a lot of products, blog posts or pages on your website, you should become familiar with the category section of your website. In this glossary article, we will look at what a category is and how you can use them.

What Is A Category?

A category is a tag that can be used to sort products, pages or blog posts into related groups of items. For instance, a marketing company might create blog categories for: email marketing, blogging, website building, etc..

Categories can be assigned to the item when you’re editing it. Each category can also have a page that is dedicated for it. For instance, a blog category page might look like:

https://www.yourdomain.com/category/categoryname/

Each page can have a description, editable URL extension and a meta description. You can also add images. This helps with your category being searchable and being listed on search engines.

How Many Categories Can You Have?

You can have an unlimited number of categories on your website. However, this can be hard to manage. So, what you might want to do, is have a set of main categories and then under these have sub-categories.

Sub-categories act the same way as categories, they’re just listed as being related to the ‘parent’ category. Using sub-categories makes it easier to manage and assign items to them, plus it adds the item to numerous lists (the parent and the subcategory) increasing the likelihood that the item will be found.

Can Items Be Added To More Than One Category?

Yes, items can be added to more than one category, even parent or subcategories. This tactic is very acceptable and helps you to manage your content that fits into numerous areas. For instance, if you have a pet product that can be used for gerbils, hamsters, guinea pigs and mice, you can have each of these as a category and ‘rodent’ as a parent category.

The advantage of this is that people will find the product whether they search in the particular product category for their pet or in the general rodent product.

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Can Categories Be Changed?

Categories can be added/removed from items at any time from the item edit page. You can also change the description of the category at any time, create an excerpt for a category or remove the word category from the category title.