Why WordPress Categories Are Not Showing

Posted on November 9th, 2008 by Jeff

So you setup a nice new WordPress blog and you have big plans for all the different things you want to blog about. So you go into the WordPress dashboard and start adding categories, you may even add subcategories into parent categories. After all your work you check out the front side of the blog but… where are all the categories?

This is a common question that some new WordPress bloggers have and the explanation is quite simple. Categories will not show on the front side of the blog until you make a post within that category. So you see it’s very simple, don’t think there is something wrong with your WordPress blog when this happens, it’s by design. The same goes for Links or Blogroll categories, the link category will not show either until you have a link created within it.

Remember you can add and edit the categories any time you want. But if you edit a category’s slug and you are using category in your permalink structure you will alter the URL of the posts within the category you edit.

5 Responses to "Why WordPress Categories Are Not Showing"

ardhian // Nov 10, 2008 at 5:07 am

some times it’s about widget matters, right ?
Jeff // Nov 10, 2008 at 8:59 am

Ardhian, there’s a possibility that a theme’s widgets are not coded correctly.

Or if you have bad code in a text widget that can really screw up all the other widgets below it too.
MissingMoney // Nov 11, 2008 at 4:20 am

post first within your categories then put up a widget on your sidebar and poof! there you go with the categories..
Jerry // Nov 15, 2008 at 12:58 pm

Thanks for the post - now I know what I was doing wrong! I’ll go fix it right now!
Busby SEO Test // Dec 3, 2008 at 11:49 pm

How to make search engine friendly when custum header ? it can be ?

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