How to Create a Custom WordPress Categories Template

Post categories and post category pages are a very useful WordPress feature, as they help users browse posts related by content. Those posts can be grouped within a single page, for the visitors’ ease of access. However, a bland or poorly designed category page can deter visitors from staying on your site and harm your overall ranking. Therefore website creators often make custom category templates to give their site that special something that captivates visitors and makes them stay a while longer.

Thanks to the versatility of WordPress, you can easily create custom templates with some code edits. You can do this either by editing the appropriate archive files or by creating one of your own which will adhere to the WordPress template structure and hierarchy. In this article, we will take a look at the reasons for using a custom WordPress categories template and how that can be done.

To help you get to grips with this topic, we’ve divided this article into several parts that you can jump to by clicking on one of the links below:

Creating a separate custom template file

Using conditional statements

Writing custom category-specific CSS

Using plugins and widgets