📘 : Category Management in WordPress

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Lumping vs. Splitting: Finding the Right Balance

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🔍 Why Category Hygiene Matters

• Helps users navigate your site efficiently
• Improves SEO and internal linking
• Keeps your site structure maintainable
• Enables smarter automation (feeds, filtering, clever layouts)

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🧠 Think Like a Librarian

Categories are like sections in a library — broad themes.
Tags are like index terms — they connect topics across sections.

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⚖️ Lumping vs. Splitting

• Lumping and splitting are essential tools for organizing information — used judiciously, they help strike a balance between clarity and nuance, avoiding both oversimplification and needless complexity.

Trait	Lumpers	Splitters
Tendency	Use 1–2 broad categories for everything	Create a new category for every minor difference
Problem	Users can’t filter by topic	Users get overwhelmed; categories become tags
Fix	Add 5–10 meaningful core categories	Merge, delete, or convert narrow categories to tags

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✅ Rules of Thumb

• One category per post (in most cases)
• 5–10 main categories is plenty for most sites
• Use tags for cross-cutting themes
• Don’t let categories become a list of tags
• No “Uncategorized” — rename it or assign a default

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🧰 Quick Maintenance Tips

• Periodically review your categories: merge low-usage ones
• Keep permalinks consistent: avoid renaming slugs unless absolutely necessary

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