Short cuts:
The right structure
Plan your categories
Free printable category planner
When most bloggers start blogging, categories are kind of an afterthought. Nobody explained how or why to set up categories strategically and so many food blogs end up with a disjointed list of both broad and narrow subjects.
It’s never too late to get your categories in order though, so if you’ve already been blogging for a while, don’t panic, I’ll help you get to work fixing it!
How the categories should be structured
We’ll start by getting the technical side out of the way before deciding which actual categories you should have and how you should set them up for your readers.
This is what it usually looks like when the categories aren’t planned ahead of time:
Breakfast
Chicken
Chocolate
Cupcakes
Dessert
Dinner
Eggs
Side dishes
Smoothies
Not only does it make it harder for readers to navigate, it also makes it harder when the time comes and you’re ready to add a fun “recipes” page where your readers can check boxes and narrow down to exactly the recipes they’re looking for.
We could take those same categories and organize them (technically speaking, a parent category and a subcategory). They’d look something like this:
Breakfast
Eggs
Smoothies
Dinner
Chicken
Side dishes
Dessert
Chocolate
Cupcakes
So Breakfast, Dinner, and Dessert are the parent categories, and Eggs, Smoothies, etc are now sub categories. Recipes can definitely cross over and go into multiple categories and subcategories.
Much easier to look at, right? Okay, so let’s plan yours.
Planning your own categories.
First, think about your readers.
If they were looking for ideas for something to cook today, what might they want to narrow it down by?
It’s easy to only think about what we want to create, but it’s important to consider what your readers are interested in.
Now think about what kind of recipes you create most.
While some categories and subcategories might seem logical to have, if you almost never post any breakfast recipes, then it wouldn’t make sense to have a category of Breakfast with various subcategories.
Your readers might see a Breakfast → Smoothies category and get excited, but then wind up disappointed when there’s only one recipe and it’s 3 years old. You don’t ever want your visitors to feel disappointed or let them expect something other than what you’re offering.
If almost all of your recipes are dinner recipes, then you might not use Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner categories at all. Maybe you could use categories like:
Main Ingredient
Chicken
Ground Beef
Steak
Vegetables
Cooking Method
Braised
Crock Pot
Grilled
Instant Pot
Special Diets
Dairy Free
Vegetarian
If you still had a few breakfast or specialty recipes that didn’t fit into other categories, as long as you will have a good number of posts inside those categories, they can just stand on their own as categories.
want a free printable category planner?
Next week, I’ll show you how to actually create the categories in WordPress, and how to re-categorize your recipes if you need to.
More food blog categories inspiration
For inspiration, take a look at Foolproof Living and Pinch of Yum. You can see the headings on the side like “Healthy” and “Breakfast.” Those are the categories, and then the options that you can select under each of them are the subcategories.
Pin this post so you don’t lose the instructions!
(And to help your blogging friends out too.)
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Thank you, so glad it’s helpful!
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I’m so glad you found it and it was helpful! 😀 I look forward to getting to know you and your blog.
such a good blog for foodies, thanks for your kind information.
Thanks very much for the post, it was very helpful! I am in the middle of setting up my food blog and was still undecided on how to structure my categories. It was a great read 🙂
I’m so glad it was helpful! Feel free to reach out if you have questions.
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I have been blogging since 1914 and blogging in the IBS niche since 2018. (85 year old granny here. (lol.) I am not successful due to my limited income for investing in my blog as well as the tech problems I can’t figure out how to fix. I just realized that my categories are a mess, but that’s not all. I need to understand the customization directions for my theme, but sadly, I don’t. Maybe there is a food blog theme that is more user-friendly? My blog is aimed at folks like me who are diagnosed with IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome). I give advice and share recipes. I have about 1100 visitors a month or a week, I can’t really tell from Google Analytics. My blog is ibskitchn.com. Any advice?
Hi Christina.
Great article on Categories for food blogs. I have a question I’ve been searching for over a year and can’t find.
First, here’s my scenario. I changed all my categories & subcategories about 1-1/2 yrs ago and, within a month, all Google traffic plummeted. I had about 10 categories and about 20 subcategories under those. So, after that happened, I changed SEO plugins and still no recovery. So, after 1/2 year later, I just changed everything to be just 5 categories and no subcategories. It was then that I was able to very gradually get back about 10% of that traffic. However, for the past 1/2 year, I can’t get noticeable gains. So, along with other things, I’m looking at categories and subcategories.
My categories currently are “Recipes”, “Food Guides”, “Equipment & Tools”, and “Food Articles”. I have about 160 recipes so far. I’ve been using Tags (using Grids) to give users an easy navigation to locate types of recipes and that seems to work very well.
However, I’m worried about my SEO not improving in the past 6 months. I’ve used 3 different SEO plugins for guidance in the past 3 years for improving content. So, after much deliberation, I’m thinking the next step is for me to improve my SEO by adding a few subcategories to help search engines further understand the site structure beyond just tags (and the main category of “Recipes”). I’m unsure if that will move the needle but, it seems to be a thing to do I’m ready for.
So, my question is this. I’ve had, in the past, such a good subcategory structure that there were no posts left to be assigned to the main categories. In other words, everything fit into every subcategory that there was nothing left to remain directly into the main category “Recipes”. Is that a problem if everything fits into the subcategories and nothing is left to go just into the main category of “Recipes”?
Also, 2nd question, most SEO writers say only assign a post to just ONE category so, that means I assign it to a subcategory and uncheck the box of its main category? That’s what I used to do; otherwise, it would show up as belong to 2 categories (1 main category + 1 subcategory). Is that correct?
Any guidance on this is greatly appreciated.