Modern Categories

The Modern Categories setting replaces the theme based category output with one that's configured to use our best practices. This resolves:

• configurations with poor options
• CLS issues with the theme category
• bad accessibility support due to multiple links pointing to the same location
• improper use of <article> semantic tags on post links

Jump to:

• Enable
• Layout
• Full Width
• Optimized pagination
• Sort order
• Image size
• Posts per page
• Subcategory listing
• Recipe time + rating
• Other archives
• Search
• Yoast
• Hooks
• Post excerpts

Enable

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

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

This is not customizable.

Full Width

While it's technically possible to select full-width layout for the category pages, we don't recommend this because:

• it's a desktop-first optimization, which makes up less than 20% of pageviews for most sites
• it removes your site-wide internal links to your trending posts and seasonal seasonal recipes, which negatively impacts SEO for your most important pages
• it messes with the desktop-to-mobile ratio (720px = 2x 360px) which can create layout issues

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

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

This uses 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.

Other archives

You can enable this for all archives as well with the filter:

add_filter('feast_modern_categories_all_archives', __return_true );

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.