How to Put All New Posts in a Category By Default in WordPress

New WordPress installations have a category called “Uncategorized” by default. You may have already created your own categories for posts, but you may find that some posts will wind up in the Uncategorized category because you forgot to select a category before publishing the post.

This is not behavior that you need to live with, and you can specify the default category for new posts that you create on your site. Our steps below will show you where to find that setting.

How to Set a Default Category for new Posts in WordPress

The steps below are going to show you how to choose which category WordPress will use by default for new posts. Note that you can still manually change the category for your posts if you would like. This will only affect the box that is initially checked when you create a new post.

Step 1: Log into the admin section on your WordPress site.

Step 2: Hover over Settings in the left column, then click the Writing option.

Step 3: Click the drop-down menu to the right of Default Post Category, then select from one of the post categories that you have created. You can then click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the window.

Is there a post that you have finished writing, but you aren’t ready to publish it on your site? Learn about scheduling posts in WordPress and see how you can tell WordPress an exact date and time at which you would like a post to go live on your site.