How to delete the compulsory “UNcategorized” category in wordpress

You can delete the mandatory “uncategorized” category in WordPress following this short guide. I will be using the award-winning cPanel for the sake of this tutorial.

Users of Parallels Plesk Panel, DirectAdmin, Interworx, XAMPP, Wampserver,  and other host management applications should just follow the steps outlined below to produce same result.

step 1  => Log in to your cPanel (by visiting yourdomain.com/cpanel or yourdomain.com:2082)

step 2 => Locate phpMyAdmin (under “databases”) and click on it

step 3 => Locate your WordPress database from the left, click on it to expand

step 4 => Locate wp_options and click on it

step 5 => From line 17 where you have default_category, click on it and replace the 1 there with 0

Hurray! all the core work is completed, you can now log out from your host management dashboard (cPanel) and go back to your wordpress account dashboard to delete the uncategorized category.

What’s Next?

Depending on your reasons for choosing to delete the uncategorized category, you can create and set another category as the default by going to

Settings => Writing => Default Mail Category => Select any category of your choice (after creating them already).

This is very helpful when you have a CMS site with custom taxonomy or want your post published as news without grouping it into category and tags.

It can also come handy when a client request that tags be used for navigation instead of categories.

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