If you use WordPress then you must be knowing what does it mean by “Uncategorized” posts. Many people or developers wanted to remove the uncategorized category in WordPress many times. Actually whenever we forget to add a category to any post, WordPress by default posts it under uncategorized. And if you leave it so by mistake then the “Uncategorized” will come in your posts although this makes the things look a little unprofessional. Remember you cannot delete the default uncategorized category in WordPress but the good news is that you can definitely rename uncategorized category in WordPress to appear the category of posts some meaningful.

Why to Rename Uncategorized Category in WordPress?

To do these changes in WordPress you don’t need to hire any expert WordPress developer as you can do these easily yourself. By default, WordPress comes with two different classifications i.e. Categories and Tags. Each of your WordPress posts must be posted under at least one category. If you forget to categorize a post then it will automatically be posted under your default category and in WordPress the default category is known as “Uncategorized”.

Although you can easily visit Posts >> Categories if you want to delete a category but you cannot delete a default category until you create another default category.

Hence, to solve this issue, you can either rename uncategorized category to something meaningful or you can set a new default category that is not named uncategorized.

Renaming Uncategorized Category in WordPress

It is not possible to delete a default category as it is an inbuilt feature of WordPress but you can rename it if you wish to. Just Visit >> Categories in your WordPress dashboard. There you will see the Uncategorized category. Click on Edit. Now you can Edit the Category Page. Here you can see the options to edit the category. Now you can change the name and edit it here.

You can even change the URL if your site is not live or yet not indexed by the search engines. If you change the URL in your live site then it will result in 404 error when search engine or users visit the old URL. Now you can rename the uncategorized category into something which you think will be more precise, meaningful or useful.

How to Change the Default Category in WordPress?

If you don’t want to delete or rename the uncategorized category then you will need to change the default category. In order to change the default category, make sure that you have a category other then uncategorized category in your WordPress. If you have one category that you want to use by default then you can use that but if you don’t have any then you can create a new category by visiting Posts >> Categories.

If you want to change the default category then go to the Settings >> Writing page. Now you can see that the first option is the default category.

Just select the category you want to use as default from the drop down menu. After that Save the changes and it is done. Now your posts will be categorized under the category which you have chosen as default in case you forget to assign a category to a post.

Here point to be noted is that, the posts that were previously posted as uncategorized will not be moved to the new category. You will need to edit the posts to change their categories.

Otherwise what you can do is just delete the uncategorized category and the posts filed under uncategorized will be categorized under the new default category. That’s it. I hope this article will help you to rename uncategorized category and to change the default category in WordPress.