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    Home » SEO

    Modern Categories

    Published: Oct 12, 2016 · Modified: Dec 2, 2023 by Skylar · 8 Comments

    The Modern Categories enables the category pages to be built with the block editor, just like the homepage and recipe index. This allows:

    • more topical expertise for be demonstrated for E-E-A-T
    • higher quality, user-focused content on the categories
    • CTAs (calls to action) to promote ebooks, newsletters and featured content
    • better organized "parent" categories by showing sections of individual child categories

    With the Feast Plugin v.10.0.0 release, you can now add custom content just like you do with the homepage and recipe index.

    See it in action here:

    (yes, I misspelled sandwiches)

    Jump to:
    • Enable
    • Custom content
    • Settings
    • Layout
    • Full Width
    • Optimized pagination
    • Sort order
    • Image size
    • Posts per page
    • Subcategory listing
    • Recipe time + rating
    • Search
    • Yoast
    • Hooks
    • Post excerpts

    Enable

    To enable the Modern Categories, just check off the checkbox in the Feast Plugin and hit save.

    Custom content

    Note: custom content is only available through the full version of the Feast Plugin, and is unavailable in the Feast Plugin Starter.

    In Admin > Feast Plugin > Modern Categories you have the ability to create custom content that will replace your existing category title and description:

    This takes you to a screen where you can see the custom content, and which category it's assigned to:

    When clicking on "Edit" under the Title, you'll be taken to the block editor to build your own custom category page.

    The category that the custom content gets assigned to is found in the right-sidebar of the block editor under "Assign to category":

    On the front-end category page, the custom content section can be accessed via the (admin only) link:

    IMPORTANT: posts displayed using the FSRI block will be excluded from being displayed in the normal category post listings below it.

    Settings

    The settings for your category pages are located in 3 areas:

    1. Admin > Posts > Categories (individual category pages)
      • name (used for Yoast breadcrumbs)
      • archive headline (used for category h1)
      • archive intro text (used for category content)
      • layout settings (sidebar vs. full width)
      • Yoast title and meta description (used for Google)
    2. Admin > Feast Plugin > Categories
      • enable the modern categories
      • display subcategories
      • 3-wide vs. 4-wide default category display
      • display 40 posts per category
      • order by last modified default category display
    3. Admin > Feast Plugin > Modern Categories
      • custom content
        • the page title and content here will entirely replace the name and archive description from the actual category pages

    Layout

    The layout follows the recommended settings in the how to use categories page:

    • 4-wide on desktop
    • 2-wide on mobile
    • only show the image and title

    As of version 9.9.0, we've added the ability to display images 3-wide on desktop so that they display larger:

    This has no impact on SEO or pagespeed.

    Full Width

    You can enable a full width layout on your categories in the "edit category" page, but it comes with some trade-offs:

    Personally, I'm a BIG fan of having the sidebar on a site. It's a strong sitewide signal for internal linking purposes.
    But if someone was to remove it JUST from categories, I guess that would be something they could do… at least it wouldn't be "as harmful" as removing the sidebar completely.
    I just personally don't see much value in doing this for most sites. It's purely cosmetic for desktop users only.

    Casey Markee

    If you want to enable a full width category page, go to Admin > Categories > Edit (on the category you want to edit) and select the "full width" layout under "Layout Settings":

    Optimized pagination

    The Modern Categories automatically exclude the introductory text when not on the first page of the categories.

    Sort order

    We recommend ordering the category page by modified date instead of published date, to help surface the best content for your readers.

    This also helps Google crawl and index the content you're updating.

    Image size

    The categories use the default image size setting in the Feast Plugin (same image size as the FSRI block):

    Ensure that the Modern Thumbnails are enabled for this.

    Posts per page

    While we recommend limiting a category to 24 posts, there are some cases (eg. parent categories, not recommended) where you can have multiple pages of categories. In this case, we recommend setting the Posts per page to 24:

    Note: our recommendation was updated from 20 posts per page, to 24, in May 2022, and then 40 later on.

    The reason we've turned this into a checkbox rather than having you manually set it, is that most bloggers don't have the time (or care enough) to test and optimize this. We're comfortable with updating this number (up or down) in the future on your behalf, based on testing and monitoring.

    This is simply one less thing on your 83-item to-do list.

    Frankly, the only reason you wouldn't display every post in a category (even 1000 posts) is because of DOM node issues relating to pagespeed.

    Note: if you do feel like managing this yourself because you have all the free time in the world, you can manually set it yourself in Settings > Reading > Blog pages show at most > #

    Subcategory listing

    We recommend against using subcategories in favor of a flatter site structure, but for users who have 500+ posts and have historically used subcategories, you can now generate a list of subcategories directly on the parent category.

    Just to be extra clear: do not create subcategories (nested categories). This is only here to help bloggers who have made this mistake (in our opinion) in the past.

    This will display all subcategories, even empty ones. We recommend deleting empty categories until you have enough content to make them useful (minimum 4, preferably 8 posts) per the how to use categories guide. Category pages need content. Sites with excessive low quality, empty pages can incur a site-wide penalty from Google.

    Recipe time + rating

    You can enable the recipe time and recipe rating display on categories in the Admin "edit category" page:

    This is enabled on a per-category level and can be useful for categories where the total time is important, such as:

    • 30 minutes or less
    • instant pot recipes
    • game day appetizers

    Video:

    Remember to fill in your archive intro text - we still see a lot of people missing category descriptions which is a big SEO issue. Google penalizes websites with high quantities of thin content and we recommend that every page+post+category on your site has unique content.

    Search

    This format will be applied to the search pages as well, in a future release.

    Yoast

    We recommend going to Yoast > Search Appearance > Taxonomies > Social Title and removing the word "Archives" being appended to the end of each category.

    Hooks

    For developers, we've added the following hooks:

    feast_before_archive
    feast_after_archive_intro
    feast_after_archive

    Thanks Mike Zielonka for the request.

    Post excerpts

    We don't recommend or support content excerpts on the category pages because:

    • it adds DOM nodes to the page, which slows pagespeed and can cause CLS issues
    • it doesn't format well on mobile, which makes up 80% of pageviews
    • it creates an accessibility burden because the screen reader must read all the except text, while a sighted user can easily navigate past it
    • your title + image should convey all the information necessary to help the reader understand what the recipe is about
    • it creates a false sense of content on category pages, even though the excerpt is all duplicate content to the post (every page requires UNIQUE content, not duplicate content)
    • It introduces unnecessary and complex configuration requirements such as where to cut off text, how much to display, and outdated "read more" tags

    Overall, we've made the intentional decision not to support excerpts anywhere in our setup, including the homepage, category page and search pages. We believe this is a mobile-first, user-experience focused approach that greatly simplifies site management and supports a modern aesthetic.

    More

    • W3 HTML Validation
    • Skip lazy loading first post image
    • SEO
    • Internal links

    Reader Interactions

    Comments

    1. Kathleen says

      October 27, 2021 at 1:49 pm

      Thanks, Skylar!
      The Yoast option to remove social title is only available in the premium version. Will it hurt to leave it there? (I have the free version at this time).

      Also, should we continue to leave the word "archives" in the SEO title? Mine is currently set up to read: %%term_title%% Archives %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%

      Really appreciate it.
      Kathleen

      Reply
      • Skylar says

        October 27, 2021 at 4:59 pm

        I don't think the word "archives" is useful at all to readers, so you can strip it from everywhere.

        It's not going to *hurt* SEO, but it could negatively impact click through rates because an "archive" has a negative connotation. I don't want a "Breakfast Archives", I want a "Best Breakfast Recipes" list.

        Reply
        • Bean says

          December 05, 2021 at 11:27 am

          Is there a way to delete the archive bit from social without premium yoast?

          Reply
          • Skylar says

            December 05, 2021 at 3:11 pm

            We only recommend and support Yoast because it's the industry standard and has dozens of individually useful features. Replacing or customizing each feature Yoast provides would cost THOUSANDS of dollars PLUS maintenance of those features every year.

            No wanting to invest in what is essentially a required plugin that delivers thousands of dollars in value means that you're creating unnecessary problems for yourself.

            Spend the $80 on Yoast premium. It's CHEAP.

            Reply
    2. Martin says

      March 29, 2022 at 3:38 am

      Hi Skylar,
      one question on Layout: I'd love to design the Desktop version for category pages with 3 columns instead of 4 columns. Do you have any quick fix for me, or is this complicated? Thanks

      Reply
      • Skylar says

        March 29, 2022 at 6:14 am

        Due to how mobile-vs-desktop is laid out (you can only display multiples of 3 AND 2 to avoid missing images at the bottom) as well as text size, image size for pagespeed, and a few other issues, we only support a 4-column layout.

        It's not that it can't be done. It just introduces a whole whack of problems that have to be re-fixed with pagespeed, accessibility, mobile, user experience and more in mind. This requires deep expertise that very few developers have.

        Supporting all these different configurations comes with a price tag and is only aesthetic - it has no functional benefit. It actually introduces technical issues if done incorrectly.

        My recommendation if you NEED a 3-column layout would be to hire a developer for a custom theme.

        Reply
    3. Meeta says

      September 02, 2022 at 5:57 am

      Hi Skylar - To enable the modern categories, do we just check the box on the feast plugin settings page? Is there any other config needed to get modern categories to work.

      Also, I am wondering if this creates a private page which can be configured to show the description and category image?

      Thanks!

      Reply
      • Skylar says

        September 03, 2022 at 1:17 pm

        Yes, to enable it, just check the box in the Feast Plugin and save. I've updated the tutorial to show this.

        Categories are edited via the core WordPress edit category page, not a separate interface. You can manually embed an image in the description, but we don't recommend this.

        The categories will undergo a major update in a future version of WordPress and we wouldn't recommend modifying or customizing them too much in the meantime.

        Reply

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