Wonder how deleting categories in WordPress works? You’re in the right place, we’ll satisfy your curiosity in a moment. The process only requires a basic knowledge of the WordPress Admin section and is in no way as hard to do as choosing the domain name for your blog. Furthermore, adding categories will help both you and your visitors find the correct content with a click, instead of searching or scrolling. That will keep them coming back and reading more, for sure. With that said, here’s how to delete categories in WordPress.
Steps to delete a category in WordPress
- Log in to the WordPress Admin section with your username and password.
- Notice the menu on the left-hand side. Expand it by clicking on the icon that looks like a play button (a rightwards filled arrow (►) enclosed in a circle).
- Click on Posts.
- Under Posts, click on Categories.
- A list of all the categories you created will appear.
- Hovering under the name of the category unveils four options, Edit, Quick Edit, Delete, and View.
- Click on Delete.
- Confirm that you want to delete the category.
Removing WordPress categories in bulk
If you want to start anew or just clean things up, it would be foolish to remove one category at a time. Instead, do this.
- Once again, click on Posts in the left-hand main menu, then choose Categories.
- A list of categories will appear.
- Instead of hovering under the name of the categories you intend to remove, tick the box in front of it.
- Click on the Bulk Actions option in the top left corner.
- From the drop-down list, choose Delete.
- Click on Apply to the right.
- Confirm the decision.
And there you have it, this is how to delete categories in WordPress. Now’s the time to make a solid plan and organize their hierarchy so that they make sense for both you and your visitors.
FAQs
Unless you have a WordPress database backup, you will not be able to recover the deleted categories at a later time. Once you delete and confirm the action, it is permanent.
Even though there is no hard limit for how many WordPress categories you can delete at a time, it is most likely to cause an error if you try to delete more than 200-250 on most servers.
Unless you have thousands of unused categories, it is not going to cause any load or problems on your server, other than taking up your database size. So if you are OKAY with that, it is probably not a problem to leave it as it is.
Yes, it is OKAY to rename your category as long as no posts are assigned to it. Even though there are posts, if the newly renamed category will make sense for those posts, there is no problem in doing so. Keep in mind that, renaming the category will not change its category_id or associations. So, if you are using the category_id in any custom features or functions, you might want to double-check that.
