Customizing Wordpress Category Pages

[Trump]

I want to customize my sites category pages, which is limited within my theme. My coding skills are also limited.

I’ve been thinking about creating pages and then using 301 redirect plugin to forward the category pages to these pages.

I’ve heard industry people doing this.

What do you guys think? Any advice? Would it be real bad for SEO? Any death traps to avoid? Also, how would I do with the slugs? I would want them to remain the same.

All advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Ryuzaki]

What do you guys think? Any advice? Would it be real bad for SEO? Any death traps to avoid? Also, how would I do with the slugs? I would want them to remain the same.

If you want your slugs to stay the same then you'll probably need to use Wordpress' (I'm assuming you're using WP) built in capabilities to do this with Category Templates. You can copy the code in the original category.php file over to the new one and then change it here. Other options are to use if-loops in the original category.php to achieve your goal. Either way, it's going to require dealing with the backend and some PHP, HTML, and CSS. And if you're doing this on a pre-made theme you'll need to do it in a child theme or you'll lose the changes when you update the theme.

 

[Trump]

If you want your slugs to stay the same then you'll probably need to use Wordpress' (I'm assuming you're using WP) built in capabilities to do this with Category Templates. You can copy the code in the original category.php file over to the new one and then change it here. Other options are to use if-loops in the original category.php to achieve your goal. Either way, it's going to require dealing with the backend and some PHP, HTML, and CSS. And if you're doing this on a pre-made theme you'll need to do it in a child theme or you'll lose the changes when you update the theme.

Sorry, I always put my questions in the wrong thread. Thanks for moving it and for replying.

It sounds rougher than I expected.

The site is fairly new, so it wouldn't be all too bad if I started changing the category URLs.

Is there a simpler solution that you could recommend for a new site?

I thought I'd just change the slug of the category page from mydomain.com/bicycles to mydomain.com/somebicycles

And then redirect the category-page to a page with the URL mydomain.com/bicycles

But I assume that would make the breadcrumbs home > somebicycles. Or maybe some other issues would appear?

Thanks.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Is there a simpler solution that you could recommend for a new site?

It depends on how different you want these category pages to be.

If you just want some unique content on them you can set up a child theme and add this to your category.php in the appropriate spot: <?php echo category_description(); ?>

Then within the Wordpress Dashboard on the Posts > Categories in the Description slot here:

You can type all the text and HTML you want. You can have paragraphs, images, links, whatever. You can format an entire page of content there below the title but above the loop that shows the posts from the category. You can probably execute PHP but it'd require a lot more work.

I do this so every category has unique and static content on it. These days I only let the first page of the category be indexed. But in the past when I let all paginated pages be indexed, I would use an if-loop so only page 1 had the category description (so it would be unique).

But I only show the description on the first page of the category. So you can use is_paged(); to do it, though the full explanation is much more involved.