Out of all the questions we ask ourselves occasionally, at some point “how many categories my blog needs” is probably going to be one of them. It’s a good question at that, and should be taken very seriously. Categories are pretty much the navigation of a website. If you blog about writing and have the categories of Creative and Inspiration writing, one of two visitors might want to look at the first category not the latter.

Read More: 3 Good Reasons Why You Should be Blogging

When you have a lot of different things in the same category it creates confusion, it makes people search for things either through the search form or the tags archives. But very rarely do people want to browse categories in hopes to find something. It’s important to understand that not everyone is dedicated enough to use Google to query your website.

It’s important to come forth for the newbie internet users and help them out, in turn they might become your customers one day.

How Many Categories Should a Blog Have

I feel that three points is going to be enough to explain and understand the importance of organized categories.

Categories

Let’s begin by acknowledging the niche we are working with. We need to narrow our niche down to the latest category we could put it under. This means taking some time and thinking over the future of the website as well. It’s especially good if you already know which niche you are working with and how the future is going to look like for you.

Create only the big categories, that categorize everything else. For example here on CodeCondo, I have got a category for blogging, so everything that is blogging related like this post is going under the blogging category. If my blog was ONLY about blogging, I would probably create many sub-categories like: tips, news, how to make money, etc,. etc,.

Sub-Categories

Categories under categories should be used to even further help people find content on your blog. Like I said above, think about the broader picture and put together categories that really define what you are writing and sharing content about.

Display of Categories

This brings us to the last part of the post, the way we display our categories. As you can see, on my blog I have them listed on my sidebar on the right side. I know the topics I am blogging about, and my category choice doesn’t take up too much space.

For other bloggers, even you, that might not be the case. Perhaps you have a lot more categories and it almost seems like they are taking up the whole sidebar. For such situations I can suggest two things:

• Categories as Menus
• Dropdown Categories

If you use WordPress you probably know that you can add and unlimited amount of menus to the top of your page. WordPress will allow you to put anything in these menus, including categories, which can further be made in drop-down menus. Only do this if it doesn’t interfere with the overall design of the website, as some free times might not be coded well enough.

The other option is to install a drop-down plugin for categories, such as Ajax Chain Selects. That way you can display the bigger categories first and the sub-categories when someone clicks on the drop-down.

I hope it makes sense and please leave a comment if you still have trouble with your categories :) I will gladly help you.