How to Auto Add Categories to WordPress Posts

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I don’t auto add categories to WordPress posts. Never!

I add them manually. But that’s just me!

You might want to automatically add categories to your posts and that is perfectly fine. So let me show you an easy way to auto add categories.

How to Auto Add Categories to WordPress Posts

In one of the previous articles, I had talked about how you can use the Automatic Post Tagger plugin to auto tag WordPress posts.

Actually, you can also use that same plugin to auto add categories to your posts.

This isn’t evident when you start using this plugin so let me show you how to do this.

First, install the Automatic Post Tagger plugin. Once installed, you should see a new menu item called Automatic Post Tagger under the Settings menu.

Automatic Post Tagger Menu

Click that to go to the Settings page. Scroll down on the Settings page till you see the section titled “Create new configuration group”.

Create New Configuration Group Section

Give a Group name, I gave “WP Categories”. Innovative Name!

Then in the Taxonomies column type in “category”, set the Term Limit to “25” and click the “Create item” button.

Create Configuration Group

That should add this new configuration to the section called “Configuration group editor”. Click the “Save changes” button in this section.

Category Configuration Group Editor

Later on, you can edit or delete the configuration groups from this section.

Now go to the section titled “Create new keyword set”. Here you will create a Keyword Set first.

You can think of the Keyword Set as a combination of Category and Keywords. What that means is that if any of the keywords that you specify in the Keyword Set are found in your post, then this plugin will automatically assign that post to the Category that you have specified in the Keyword Set.

In the image below you can see that I created a Keyword Set with the category as “WordPress Tutorials” and then for this category, I defined the keywords to be “tutorial” and “training”.

Create Category Keyword Set

Also, notice that in the “Configuration group” column, I have selected the configuration group “WP Categories” that we just created above.

Now click the “Create item” button to add your Keyword Set to the section “Keyword set editor”.

Category Keyword Set Editor

Don’t forget to click the “Save changes” button to save your changes.

That is it!

Now, whenever you write a post that contains any of the keywords “tutorial” or “training” in either the body, title or excerpt of the post, that post will automatically get assigned to “WordPress Tutorials” category.

Auto Add Categories to WP Posts

If you want to automatically assign even more Categories to the post, just create the Keyword Sets for each category.

Your Turn…

Go and try out this plugin to auto add categories to WordPress posts.

Also, do let me know why you decided to auto add categories. I would love to hear your views.

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