Organizing your posts in a WordPress website helps users find relevant content and search engine algorithms accurately crawl your site. Although a WordPress post can be assigned to multiple categories as you want, doing it the right way can provide the needed results. Overloading a post into categories though can hurt your site’s SEO and performance. So, how many categories can a WordPress post be assigned to?
Assigning a WordPress post to multiple categories is beneficial in several ways. It helps users discover content when their topics of interest genuinely overlap. If a user is reading content about car maintenance under the Services category, they may also find top car product content useful. Assigning posts to categories also helps to keep related content connected and allows visitors to easily explore content based on their interests.
The number of categories to assign a post can affect your website negatively if not done right. Although you can assign a WordPress to as many categories as you want, best practices recommend a minimalist approach:
Keeping things minimal provides better outcomes as far as WordPress post categorization is concerned. Even when you have many categories, it helps to use parent-child category structures. This way, you can still keep things simple and achieve better organizations and local SEO benefits.
WordPress does not have any explicit limits to how many categories you can assign a post to. In fact, the platform offers a lot of flexibility for organizing content as you like. However, knowing how the number of categories affects the performance of your website can help in making better decisions. You may want to assign a post to many categories that you feel are relevant, but overloading a post into categories will only lead to performance issues.
Although WordPress does not cap the number of categories to assign per post, too many categories can lead to a slower loading time of up to 300ms on category pages. In turn, this can lead to a drop in search keyword ranking of up to 15-25%. To keep things in check and ensure you are getting the best from your categories, limit a post to 1-2 main categories, limiting the total number of tags and categories to under 10.
If you add too many categories to your WordPress website, you are likely to suffer from bad SEO, higher bounce rates, and other performance issues. For instance, posts with more than five categories will usually lead to a 25% higher bounce rate. Therefore, it helps to limit your choice when adding categories or using a tool like the PublishPress Checklist plugin, which helps to identify posts that have been over-categorized.
If you are using WordPress.com Reader, you will need to keep things simpler. The platform has a stricter limit of 15 combined categories and tags per post. Anything beyond this means that your post will not be visible on the platform.
The WordPress.com Reader uses a unique algorithm that prioritizes focused content categorization. This ensures that the algorithm maintains quality recommendations without duplication. If a post exceeds 15 combined taxonomies, it is automatically excluded from discovery features and topic feeds.
One of the easiest ways to stay within the limits and organize your content without compromising performance is by using parent-child categories. While the parent categories are used for broader topics child categories allow you to narrow down to more specific ones. For instance, you may use a parent category like service for your business, and then narrow it down to each service offered under the child categories. This way, you will avoid over-categorizing and boost traffic retention of referral traffic from WordPress.com Reader.
Handling categories in your WordPress site, especially for bulk posts can be time-consuming. Without the necessary tools and expertise, any poor categories can negatively affect the performance of your website. At WpDepend, we streamline this process for you, cutting down on administrative tasks needed to keep your website functioning. Get in touch with us today for a consultation and guidance.
A seasoned technology writer and marketing consultant with over a decade of experience helping businesses grow online. I specialize in content marketing, SEO, web design, and e-commerce development. I am enthusiastic about using cutting-edge technology to acquire high-quality traffic, generate leads, and increase sales for my clients.
