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How to Hide or Customize Subcategories in WordPress

| March 28, 2025
How to Hide or Customize Subcategories in WordPress

Introduction 

WordPress provides a fantastically flexible shape for organizing content through categories and subcategories. Categories and subcategories play a critical function in enhancing internet site navigation, ensuring customers can discover relevant content material efficaciously. While classes help in better content material agency, sometimes you can need to cover or customize subcategories for a cleanser web site appearance or improved navigation.

Many website proprietors opt to simplify their navigation menus through hiding subcategories from specific regions. Others need to customise how subcategories seem to ensure they align with their web page’s design and value goals. Whether you’re walking a personal weblog, a news website, or an eCommerce shop, dealing with category display correctly can make a widespread difference in person experience and search engine marketing.

Hiding or customizing subcategories can help in more than one approaches. For instance, it is able to save you pointless class muddle, make your internet site look extra professional, and even enhance search engine scores by decreasing reproduction content material. Fortunately, WordPress gives numerous strategies to reap this—ranging from simple integrated settings to advanced customization techniques the usage of CSS, plugins, and PHP changes.

In this comprehensive guide, we will explore various approaches to hide or customize subcategories in WordPress. If you’re a beginner looking for a quick solution, check out our Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a One-Page Website with WordPress. For those interested in the latest WordPress features, explore our blog on Exploring WordPress 6.8: Latest Features with Screenshots. This guide will provide step-by-step instructions for all levels. By the end of this guide, you’ll have a clear understanding of how to manage category visibility and display settings to enhance your website’s usability and aesthetics.

Why Hide or Customize Subcategories in WordPress?

Before we dive into the solutions, let’s understand why hiding or customizing subcategories may be necessary:

  • Improved Navigation: Too many subcategories can clutter menus and confuse users.
  • Better User Experience: Hiding subcategories can make the site look cleaner and more structured.
  • SEO Benefits: Removing unnecessary category pages can prevent duplicate content issues and help search engines focus on your main content. You can track the effectiveness of your optimizations using our WordPress Post Analytics – A Simple Guide to Tracking Your Blog Performance.
  • Control Over Display: You might want certain categories to be visible only in specific areas while keeping them hidden elsewhere.
  • Customization for Branding: Some themes may not handle subcategories well, and custom styling is required to match your site’s aesthetics.

Now, let’s explore different ways to achieve this.

Objectives of Hiding or Customizing Subcategories in WordPress

To enhance internet site navigation by using reducing muddle in menus and widgets.

  • To improve website navigation by reducing clutter in menus and widgets.
  • To optimize search engine optimization by way of stopping reproduction content material troubles due to excessive category listings.
  • To preserve better manipulate over the show of content on archive pages, sidebars, and widgets.
  • To align category displays with branding and design alternatives.
  • To enhance website overall performance by using lowering needless page hundreds and database queries.
  • To make sure that handiest relevant categories are visible to visitors while maintaining certain ones hidden.

Advantages of Hiding or Customizing Subcategories in WordPress

1. Improved User Experience

  • A well-structured website ensures that visitors can easily find relevant content.
  • Reducing clutter in menus and sidebars makes navigation more intuitive.

2. Better SEO Optimization

  • Hiding unnecessary subcategories prevents search engines from indexing duplicate content.
  • A clean category structure improves site hierarchy, enhancing search engine rankings.

3. Enhanced Design and Aesthetics

  • Customizing subcategories allows you to maintain a visually appealing and professional website layout.
  • Subcategories can be hidden or displayed based on specific design requirements.

4. Greater Control Over Content Display

  • You can choose where and when subcategories appear on your website.
  • Hiding categories in specific sections helps in better content organization.

5. Increased Website Speed and Performance

  • Reducing unnecessary elements on pages minimizes database queries and improves page load times.
  • A streamlined category structure contributes to better website performance.

6. Seamless Content Management

  • With proper subcategory management, content editors and administrators can work more efficiently.
  • Keeping the backend organized leads to better content curation and publishing.

Features of WordPress Category Customization

1. Built-in Category Management

  • WordPress allows easy addition, deletion, and modification of categories and subcategories.
  • Users can manually include or exclude categories from menus and widgets.

2. Custom CSS for Hiding Subcategories

  • CSS can be used to hide subcategories from specific sections without removing them from the database.
  • Styles can be applied to enhance or alter category display settings.

3. Plugins for Simplified Category Customization

  • WordPress offers various plugins that allow users to hide or customize subcategories without coding.
  • Plugins like Ultimate Category Excluder and WP Hide Category provide easy-to-use interfaces.

4. PHP Customization for Advanced Users

  • Developers can modify WordPress theme files to create customized category display rules.
  • Custom functions can be added to the theme’s functions.php file to exclude specific subcategories.

5. WooCommerce Category Management

  • WooCommerce users can hide product subcategories from category pages and widgets.
  • Custom code or plugins can be used to control product category visibility.

6. Taxonomy and Archive Page Customization

  • WordPress allows customization of taxonomy templates to display categories in a specific manner.
  • Archive pages can be adjusted to hide or rearrange subcategories dynamically.

Methods to Hide or Customize Subcategories in WordPress

1. Using WordPress Built-in Settings

WordPress provides a simple way to manage category display.

Steps:

  1. Go to Appearance > Menus in your WordPress dashboard.
  2. Locate the subcategories under “Categories.”
  3. Remove the subcategories from the menu by clicking the dropdown and selecting “Remove.”
  4. Save the menu to apply changes.

This method works if you only want to hide subcategories from navigation menus, but they will still be accessible on archive pages and category widgets.

2. Hiding Subcategories with CSS

If you want to hide subcategories across different parts of your site (without removing them), CSS can be a great option.

Steps:

Navigate to Appearance > Customize > Additional CSS.

Add the following CSS code:

ul.children {
    display: none;
}

Click Publish to apply changes.

This will hide all subcategories from category lists, archives, and widgets.

3. Hiding Subcategories with Plugins

If you’re not comfortable with code, using a plugin is an easy alternative. Some useful plugins include:

Ultimate Category Excluder

  1. Install and activate the Ultimate Category Excluder plugin.
  2. Go to Settings > Category Excluder.
  3. Select the subcategories you want to hide from different areas (archives, front page, search results, feeds, etc.).
  4. Click Save Changes.

WP Hide Category Plugin

  1. Install the WP Hide Category plugin.
  2. Navigate to Settings > Hide Categories.
  3. Choose the subcategories you want to hide.
  4. Save the settings.

These plugins offer flexible ways to hide categories from appearing in different sections without modifying any code. If you’re interested in more advanced WordPress customization, check out our blog on Exploring the Latest WordPress Themes Released in 2025.

4. Hiding Subcategories Using PHP

For advanced users, modifying your theme’s PHP files can provide more control.

Hiding Subcategories from Category Archive Pages

Add the following code to your theme’s functions.php file:

function exclude_subcategories_from_archives($query) {
    if ($query->is_category() && $query->is_main_query()) {
        $query->set('category__not_in', array(10, 15)); // Replace with actual subcategory IDs
    }
}
add_action('pre_get_posts', 'exclude_subcategories_from_archives');

Hiding Subcategories from the WordPress Sidebar

If you want to remove subcategories from the widget, use:

function remove_subcategories_from_widget($args) {
    $args['exclude'] = '10,15'; // Replace with subcategory IDs
    return $args;
}
add_filter('widget_categories_args', 'remove_subcategories_from_widget');

5. Customizing Subcategory Display

If you don’t want to hide subcategories completely but rather customize how they appear, here are some options:

1. Displaying Subcategories in a Dropdown

Modify the navigation menu to show subcategories in a dropdown by adding this CSS:

ul.children {
    display: none;
}
ul.parent-category:hover > ul.children {
    display: block;
}

2. Changing Subcategory Layout in Archives

If you want to modify the layout of subcategories, update the category.php file:

if (is_category()) {
    echo '<h2>Subcategories:</h2>';
    wp_list_categories(array('child_of' => get_query_var('cat'), 'title_li' => ''));
}

6. Hiding Subcategories in WooCommerce

If you’re running a WooCommerce store, hiding product subcategories might be useful.

Using CSS

Add this to your Additional CSS:

ul.product-categories .children {
    display: none;
}

Using PHP

Add this to functions.php:

add_filter('woocommerce_product_subcategories_args', function($args) {
    $args['hide_empty'] = true;
    return $args;
});

Conclusion

Managing classes and subcategories successfully is critical for preserving a person-pleasant and expert website. Whether you need to declutter navigation menus, enhance SEO, or keep a selected design, hiding or customizing subcategories can extensively beautify your website online’s capability and aesthetics.

By enforcing the strategies protected in this guide, you may advantage full control over how subcategories seem for your WordPress website. If you pick a straightforward approach, the integrated settings or CSS answers will paintings well. For folks who require deeper customization, plugins and PHP adjustments offer greater advanced alternatives.

For additional insights on WordPress optimization and lead conversion, check out our guide on How to Effectively Generate and Convert Leads with Affiliate Marketing in WordPress. With these strategies, you can create a seamless, structured, and professional-looking WordPress site that enhances user experience and ensures efficient navigation.

With those strategies, you could create a continuing, dependent, and professional-looking WordPress site that complements person enjoy and ensures green navigation. If you have any questions or want assistance, sense loose to depart a remark or discover extra sources related to WordPress customization.