I am in the process of designing/building a new website structure when it occurred to me that, somewhere in the of my mind, I should not create empty categories. Time to ask the oracle that is ChatGPT.
Why You Should Not Create Empty Categories
- Poor User Experience (UX)
- Visitors may click on a category expecting content and be met with an empty page. That can appear unprofessional or confusing.
- Negative SEO Impact
- Empty categories may be seen by Google as low-value or thin content, which can negatively affect your site’s rankings.
- They can also contribute to crawl inefficiency, wasting crawl budget on unhelpful pages.
- Visual Clutter
- In menus or sidebar widgets, showing categories with no posts creates unnecessary noise and complicates navigation.
- Broken Expectations
- If you use category archives in your sitemap, they may be indexed prematurely, sending users to empty or irrelevant pages.
Best Practices
- Create categories only when you have content ready (or will be publishing imminently).
- Hide empty categories from navigation menus and widgets:
- Many WordPress widgets and themes allow this setting (e.g., tick “Hide empty categories” in the Categories widget).
- Use draft or private posts if you’re preparing a content cluster but aren’t quite ready to publish
Exceptions?
- If you’re planning a site structure in advance, it’s OK to temporarily create categories behind the scenes. Just keep them unpublished from menus and sitemap until they’re populated.
Once again, I need to take a step back and remove the categories I have just created and reinstate them as and when the content is ready. – Moral of the Story: Learn to walk before you try to run.
Interestingly, I learned, at a family lunch, today that my sister uses ChatGPT extensively to help write her books and business templates.
And there was I, thinking that only I had discovered the power of AI.
