How to Move Categories in WordPress & Woocommerce

May 17, 2018 11:21am

Categorizing posts and, in Woocommerce, products, is a great feature to make it easier for your site’s visitors to find what they’re after.

Categories can be “parents” or “children”, or even both in some cases. A child category is simply a sub-category of it’s parent. So you may have a category setup that looks like this:

• Dogs – this is a standard Parent category, with no higher level parents
  • Collies – this is a Child category of Dogs
  • Shepherds
  • Retrievers
• Cats – Another Parent category, this one has no children
• Birds
  • Raptors – This is both a child (of Birds) and a Parent (of Owls, Eagles and Hawks)
    • Owls
    • Eagles
    • Hawks
  • Waterfowl
  • Poodles – oh no, though, this is in the wrong place!

What we’re dealing with today is how to move categories around, which WordPress makes easy. You don’t have to fiddle with moving every single post in the category or anything, like you might imagine moving files around on a computer. Instead, we’ll just move the entire category.

In the example list above, Poodles would do better beneath the Dogs parent category. Let’s move it.

1. Go to Posts > Categories or Products > Categories (for Woocommerce). Though note this will work for any hierarchical (where you can have parents and children, as opposed to Tags, which are not organized in this way) taxonomy. Taxonomy is just a fancy word for “a type of category.”

2. Once you’re on the list of categories, click on the one you want in order to get to it’s editor screen.

3. On the category editor screen, find the Parent category dropdown. Click on it, and choose the new parent category you’d like.

4. Scroll down and click Update.

And tada, you’re all set!

Up Next: How to Crop an Image Using WordPress Default Functionality