How to Show/Hide Categories in WordPress (Ultimate Guide)

Do you want to show or hide a category based on whether there are posts in WordPress?

By default, WordPress does not display empty categories. However, sometimes you might want to display them even if they have no content.

In this article, we will show you some simple ways to hide or show categories in WordPress, depending on whether there are any posts in that category.

Why Hide or Show Empty Category in WordPress

WordPress comes with two default taxonomy: Category and Tag. Tags are used for specific topics of articles, while categories have broader meanings.

Many website owners use categories to create different sections for their WordPress websites.

For example, at WPBeginner we have different categories covering the main parts of the overall content.

By default, WordPress does not display empty categories in the category widgets and category lists.

However, some website owners may still need to display empty categories on their WordPress blog.

For example, if they are developing custom theme designs, or they just want the user to see empty categories and fill them with user-generated content.

Similarly, some websites may want to hide certain categories without any posts while still showing other empty categories.

In this guide, we will show you how to easily hide or display empty categories in WordPress.

Show empty categories in WordPress

WordPress now uses widget blocks to replace old classic widgets. This makes it more difficult to change the parameters used by the category block to list the categories.

To achieve the result we want, we need to write our own code to list the categories and then display it with the shortcode.

For this tutorial, you need to add some code to your WordPress website. If you haven't done this before, see our guide on how to add custom code snippets in WordPress.

First, you need to add the following code to the functions.php file of the theme or add code snippets using WPCode (recommended).

For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to easily add custom code in WordPress.

This code simply uses our own parameters to list the categories, and one of these parameters is to change the hide_empty category parameter.

After that, you can display the custom category by adding the shortcode block to the widget area and then adding the shortcode in [custom_categories_list].

Don't forget to update your widget settings once you're done.

You can then visit your website to see the categories that are running.

Hide specific categories in the category list

Again, you can use the same method to exclude categories that you do not want to be included in the category list.

Just modify the above code as follows:

All in One SEO for WordPress is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market that allows you to easily control how your website looks in search results.

After installing the plugin, you will see a setup wizard. This is self-explanatory, but if you need help, follow our guide on setting up All in One SEO.

Next, you need to visit the Posts » Categories page and click the Edit link below the category you want to exclude.

On the Edit Category page, you need to scroll down to the All-in-One SEO section.

Then, switch to the Advanced tab.

From here, you need to turn off the “Default Settings” option next to the robot settings. You will now see the option to tell search engines not to track and index this category.

When you are done, don't forget to click the "Update" button to save your settings.

All-in-one SEO will now begin telling search engines not to index or follow that particular page.

Note: Posts submitted under this category may still be indexed by search engines and appear in search results.

We hope this article helps you understand how to hide or display empty categories in WordPress. You may also want to check out our guide on how to show personalized content to different users in WordPress, and the best WordPress plugins our experts have picked for business websites.

The above is the detailed content of How to Show/Hide Categories in WordPress (Ultimate Guide). For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!