Do you want to change the appearance of individual category archives in WordPress? If so, you can follow this guide to completion.

The WordPress theme you use throughout is applied in the same way even for category archives. However, if you want to change the appearance to make it more attractive and to differentiate each category, you can customize it yourself.

In this article, we will show you how to organize different categories in WordPress.

Reasons To Change Category Display in WordPress

As we said above, the WordPress theme uses the same template or appearance for each archive page. This method was created because the developers did not know how users would use the categories on their sites.

However, when you wish to change the appearance of the category archive to be different from the default, this can still be done by several methods which we will discuss below.

So, let’s discuss how to change the appearance of category archives in WordPress. You can choose one of the appropriate methods to use.

Using a WordPress Theme Category Template

The WordPress theme uses a standard template hierarchy. It relies on the name of the template file, WordPress can automatically choose the right template to display the page.

For example, using the “category.php” file to display the category archive page.

Not only that, you can also create templates for each category. For example, you want to organize the “Android” category so that it looks different from other category archives.

You can do this by adding a new template file to your WordPress theme and naming it with category at the beginning and following the category name, it will be like this “category-android.php”.

To be able to do this, you can use cPanel hosting or use an FTP client, then go to the “public_html/wp-content/themes/your-themes” folder and create a new file “category-android.php”. Don’t forget to replace Android with your category.

Now you can use the contents of the category.php or archive.php files for most themes. Just edit and copy all the contents of the file, and paste it into the category-android.php file that you created.

After that, you can make changes to the individual category templates. Like make a different sidebar or make it full width. Not only that, you can do whatever customization you want with these individual files.

Setting Up Category Archive Display in WordPress With CSS

WordPress automatically adds new CSS classes to various elements on the website. This includes the body class and the post class.

You can see this when you access the category archive and use the Inspect Element, there will be the category CSS class and the category name in the body tag.

You can use this CSS class to change the appearance of individual categories using custom CSS code.

Here is an example of CSS code that you can use to change the appearance of the category archive.

Don’t forget to change the category name in the CSS class according to what you are going to replace.

I hope this article helped you in changing the appearance of individual category archives in WordPress.

Hopefully the above guide is useful. If you have any questions leave them in the comments column below.