After hearing Beth’s confusion about the concept, I realized that there are many who might be afflicted with “Uncategorized” as their default category, and you don’t need USS WordPress Commander Lorelle VanFossen to tell you why that’s bad.

The reason that Uncategorized is, by default, seemingly “un-deletable”. The delete option just isn’t available in your category listings. However, it doesn’t have to be that way.

The reason that you can’t delete Uncategorized is because it’s your default category when you install WordPress. The default category is the one that posts will be automatically shoved into if you fail to select another category when publishing a post. It’s also the category that posts get filed under when their category is deleted. In order to delete Uncategorized, all you have to do is set another category as your default!

Changing your default category

Head to Settings>>Writing in your WordPress admin panel. You’ll see a dropdown labeled “Default Post Category” (shown below). Change it, and you officially have changed your default post category. (Imagine that!)

WordCast's default post and link categories

Congratulations! You can now delete Uncategorized, which will move all the posts within it to a new default category (if you want all of them somewhere else, temporarily change the default to where you want the posts to go). We recommend setting the default post category to the most commonly used or most general category you might have, just in case you forget to categorize something down the road.

Hopefully this tip will help you down your bloggy road! Use it wisely, and thanks for reading WordCast!

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• Kym’s design idea
• Widget Tutorial
• Options Theme
• Plugin of the Week: Akismet – Spam protection bundled with WP
• CuteFTP
• SmartFTP

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