Renaming Uncategorized Category in WordPress
You cannot delete a default category, but you can rename it. You need to visit Posts » Categories page in the WordPress admin and click on the edit link below the Uncategorized category.
This will bring you to the category edit screen where you can rename your category and change its URL slug.
If your site is not live or indexed by search engines, then you can change the URL slug.
However, if your site is live, then changing the URL slug will result into 404 errors when search engines or actual users visit the old URL.
Don’t worry, we will show you how to setup redirects later in this article.
Changing Default Category in WordPress
You can also easily change the default category in WordPress. First make sure you have a category other than uncategorized available.
If you have a category that you would like to use as default, then you can skip this step. Otherwise, go to Posts » Categories and create a new category.
Now visit Settings » Writing page. The first option on the page is to set a default post category.
Click on the drop down menu next to it and select the default category you would like to use.
Don’t forget to click on the save changes button to store your settings.
WordPress will now use the category you selected as the default category. If you forget to assign a category to a post, then it will be filed under this default category.
However, posts filed under uncategorized will not be moved to the new category. You can edit those posts and change their category.
If there are just a couple of posts, then you can do it manually. Otherwise, you may want to check out our guide on how to bulk move posts to categories and tags in WordPress.
You can also delete the ‘Uncategorized’ category. If a post was only filed under uncategorized, then it will be automatically moved to your new default category.
Redirecting Old Uncategorized URL
If your site was live when you renamed the uncategorized category slug, or deleted the uncategorized category, then users and search engines will see a 404 page for the old URL.
Here is how you can easily fix that and redirect users to your new category URL or the renamed URL.
First you need to install and activate the Simple 301 Redirects plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you need to visit Settings » 301 Redirects page and enter your old uncategorized url in the Request field and your new URL into the destination field.
For example, if your old uncategorized URL was like this
http://example.com/category/uncategorized/
Then you will enter /category/uncategorized/ in the request field.
In the destination field, you need to enter the full new URL. For example:
http://example.com/category/general/
Don’t forget to click on the save changes button to store your settings.