Categories are useful to help readers navigate your website with ease.

Curious to use them on your own blog site? Here’s how I implemented the use of mine.

I decided to group my posts by the following categories after brainstorming a quick list:

• Playscape
• Gardening
• Home Improvement (A.K.A. Cozy Spaces)
• Celebrate (A.K.A. An excuse to party)
• Mindfulness (A.K.A. Living in the moment)
  • Running & Hiking
• Storytelling
• Good Food
  • Recipes
• Family
• Cincinnati (A.K.A. My home)
• Finances
  • Side Hustles
• Art
  • Bookbinding
  • Printing
• Parenting

Once I came up with the list, I added the categories under the Posts section by clicking on “Categories” and filling out the form individually for each term.

Side note: Apparently, most sites use a maximum of 5 categories. (Then they can use them as the menu dropdowns.) Some of the biggest sites use 12. Oops! I started with 16. Oh well. Learn from my mistake.

However, if you suffer from decision paralysis LIKE ME… I argue it doesn’t matter. In my defense, I was new to blogging and figured I’d eventually delete the ones I never ended up using. Otherwise, I worried I’d never get started if I just didn’t throw them all against the wall and see what stuck.

After created, I clicked on the appropriate category while writing a blog post. Within the blog draft, I selected the corresponding categories in the settings tab. Then, when someone searches via category, a list of posts with this designation pop up.

I also obtained a URL link to each category to add to my home page. From the groups of categories listed, if someone wants to read all my posts on finance, then all they need to do is click the photograph for that category and they will be taken to a blog page where all the articles on finance are listed!

To obtain a URL link, the formula is: “https://yourdomain.com/category/whatever-the-category-slug-is/“. (For categories with multiple words, just add a dash.)

For example, mine would be:

www.fermentingtofianance/category/finance

www.fermentingtofianance/category/home-improvement

If you want to list the categories on the side of your blog page, or list them in a drop down menu – that’s handy, too! (I couldn’t figure out how to do it in a pleasing way with my site theme template, so I opted to skip that step. But maybe soon I’ll revisit!)

The next hot blogging tip I want to share is using internal links! Stay tuned!