How to Add Category Description WordPress [Guide]

Creating a website on WordPress is simple but to maintain a website in a proper way you need to have special attention to your site’s Categories and Tags. With categories and tags, it is simple to organize your website and its content. Every content in WordPress will be placed under some category, if there is no category added on your WordPress website, then it will be automatically listed under the Uncategorized list. But, having every content under uncategorized or some single category will make your site disordered. Also, things get even messier when you have an eCommerce or shopping website while updating or finding something from the website. In the upcoming article, we will tell you in detail about how to add category descriptions in WordPress and help you organize your WordPress website.

Category description is not popularly used/displayed on blogs or content-creating websites. On the other hand, it is very much important in shopping, news, or eCommerce website. Because in shopping websites, the category is the primary factor used by the users to navigate through the online store to find the product. So while adding the category and category description, it is important to be short, precise, and SEO friendly because not many users read the category description. But with the category description, you can boost the search engine result with proper keywords/phrases added to the description. Continue reading the article to find how to add category descriptions in WordPress.

Steps to Add Category Description in WordPress

There are two possible ways to add categories in WordPress. They are direct via WordPress (if the theme displays categories) and via PHP (if the theme does not support categories).

Add/Display Category Description WordPress (Direct Method)

[1] Go to your WordPress dashboard and choose the Post section.

[2] Under Categories, click on the Categories option.

[3] Click on Add New to add a new category along with the description to your WordPress website.

[4] To add a description to the existing category, click on Edit under the category name.

[5] Here you can find the Description text box where you can add your category description.

Likewise, you can apply this process to create and edit any number of categories on your website.

Also read How to Display Relative Dates in WordPress

Add Category Description WordPress (PHP Method)

In WordPress, almost every theme comes with an option to display categories and category descriptions automatically on the category archive page. If the theme does not have the features, you can still add it using some simple PHP code adding to your theme’s PHP file.

[1] From the Theme section or FTP client page and open the category.php file.

Note: If there is no category.php file in your theme and go to the archive.php file.

[2] Enter the following line of category/archive PHP file.

<?php 
the_archive_description( '<div class="taxonomy-description">', '</div>' ); 
?>

[3] Once the code is added, save the changes.

[4] Now you can see a new description section on your category panel.

[5] To display the category description in other sections of your website, add the following code.

<?php 
echo category_description(CATEGROY ID); 
?>

Note: Make sure to replace the CATEGORY ID with your WordPress category ID.

[6] In order to display the category description in a single post, add the following PHP code.

$catID = get_the_category();
echo category_description( $catID[0] ); 

[7] To display all the available WordPress categories in a listed format, add the following line of code.

function my_catlist_desc() { 
$string = '<ul>';
$catlist = get_terms( 'category' );
if ( ! empty( $catlist ) ) {
  foreach ( $catlist as $key => $item ) {
    $string .= '<li>'. $item->name . '<br />';
    $string .= '<em>'. $item->description . '</em> </li>';
  }
}
$string .= '</ul>';
return $string; 
}

[8] You can even make this category list as a shortcode to add it to any of your WordPress pages/posts. To do that add the following line at the end of the category list code.

add_shortcode('my_categories', 'my_catlist_desc');

[9] You can call this shortcode anywhere on your WordPress page/post by click on Add block (+) icon.

[9] Search for Shortcode and click on the Shortcode icon.

[10] Enter the following shortcode [my_categories] to add the category on your WordPress page/post.

[11] Now you have successfully added and even created shortcodes to display the category/category list on your WordPress website.

Related: How to Add a Drop-Down Menu in WordPress in Easy Ways

Conclusion

Hope this guide was helpful to add and display the category section on your WordPress website. Adding categories, tags, category descriptions in the right format will improve your WordPress SEO. So make use of these categories in the correct way to rank your website better. If you have any queries let us know in the comments section below.