I need to have category not tag! How do I add category easily?

  • Unknown's avatar
    antiagingandwellnesscompany · Member ·

    I tried to setup but the category reverts to the cat list select , “home” which is not what I want. Will not change. There is no DONE TO Finalize!

    WP.com: Yes
    Correct account: Yes

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to moderators and staff)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    Are you speaking of adding categories in the editor when writing a post? Can you check if it makes a difference if you edit your post using another browser?

    All you should need to do there is to check the box next to the category you want, and save/update the post.

    However, I do notice you currently have 296 categories on your site. If you have too many categories, the editor can sometimes have trouble loading them all, which could be causing issues with properly assigning them to posts as well. So I’d recommend reducing your number of categories.

    The category taxonomy is intended to be used for a handful of main subjects you blog about. In other words, those are the very broad categories content on your site can be sorted under. Think of categories similar to the different genres of fiction, i.e. there’s Romance, Mystery, Western, Thriller, Science Fiction, etc.

    Based on a quick scan of your existing categories, for your site that could be stuff like Medicine, Alternative Medicine, Mental Health, Cancer.

    If two categories are very closely related, but you do want them separate, it might be a good idea to put them in a parent-child relationship. For example, Medicine can be your parent category, with Alternative Medicine being a sub-category. Going with the fiction analogy above, Science Fiction has the sub-genres of Steampunk, Hard Sci Fi, Military Sci Fi, Space Opera, etc.

    Tags, on the other hand, are for key words related to specific posts. For our fiction example above, think of key words in the blurb on the back of individual books.

    For your site, under the Mental Health category, you can have posts tagged with anxiety, baby blues, ADHD, autism, etc. Under Alternative Medicine you’ll have posts tagged with CBD, hemp, herbal, edibles, etc.

    We have some more information on this here:

    https://wordpress.com/en/support/posts/categories-vs-tags/

    So try checking which of your categories would work better as tags instead, and try to cut down the total number of categories on your site. Then the editor should have less trouble loading them all and correctly assigning the ones you pick.

    If you find yourself adding more than three categories to the same post, chances are you should be adding those as tags instead. Also try to avoid using the same term as both a category and a tag – I see you have a few of those.

    Let us know if you have any questions about this.

  • Unknown's avatar
    antiagingandwellnesscompany · Member ·

    Thank you. I just saw this today. 3-5-2022 Where will my prior posts go if they have posted to one of the prior 296 categories? Will they be lost?
    Thanks again.

  • staff-totoro · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    You can delete categories from your blog posts, and it does not delete the post itself. It only removes the category from the post, but the post content (text/images) itself is untouched.

    https://wordpress.com/support/posts/categories/#edit-or-delete-categories

    Hope that helps. Please let us know if you have any more questions.

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