Do you want to know when a custom post type or taxonomy should be used on your website?
Taxonomies and custom post types let you better organize and group your material. This makes it easier for your website visitors to find what they’re looking for and navigate around it.
We’ll go through why and when you should utilize a custom post type or taxonomy in WordPress in this article.
What are WordPress Custom Post Types?
Other content categories, such as posts and pages, are equivalent to custom post types. Any form of material you publish on your website is referred to as a post type.
By default, WordPress includes the following post types:
- Post
- Page
- Attachment
- Revision
- Nav Menu
In WordPress, post kinds are used to assist distinguish between different sorts of content. Posts and pages are both sorts of posts, but they have different objectives.
Custom post types allow you to build your own post types. These are handy when writing content that isn’t in the traditional post or page format.
If you run a book review website, for example, you’ll almost certainly want to establish a book reviews post type. This post type can include a variety of custom fields as well as a distinct category structure.
Custom post types are already used by several popular WordPress plugins to store data on your website.
WooCommerce — Adds a custom post type called “product” to your WordPress site.
WPForms — Creates a post type called ‘wpforms’ to store all of your forms.
MemberPress — Adds a custom post type called’memberpressproduct.’
Custom post types and taxonomies are also used to sort information in WordPress eCommerce plugins, directory plugins, real estate plugins, recipe plugins, and other plugins.
What are WordPress taxonomies?
Taxonomies are used to organize posts and custom post types into categories.
In WordPress, there are two taxonomies: categories and tags. These are good for ordinary blog articles, but when you start using custom post kinds, they may not be as useful.
For example, you could construct a ‘Books’ custom post type and sort it using a ‘Subjects’ custom taxonomy.
Then you can include topics like Fantasy, Horror, Romance, Self-Help, and others. This allows you and your readers to rapidly sort books according to their preferred genre.
How Do You Know If You Need a Custom Taxonomy or Post Type?
In theory, you can add any type of material to WordPress articles and arrange them using categories and tags, but this isn’t always the best solution.
Here are some indicators that you should probably consider establishing a custom post type, custom taxonomy, or combining the two:
- Some of the content you’re sharing doesn’t seem or feel like a post. For instance, take a look at our blogging coupons page.
It’s not necessary for your material to be part of a chronological list of entries. For instance, take a look at our WordPress vocabulary section. - You won’t be able to arrange and sort such information using categories or tags. For instance, take a look at the various categories in our coupons department.
- Additional fields are required to enter additional information with your content.
- It is not permitted to be included in your pages. Our Blueprint page, for example, is merely a page with multiple subpages.
You must provide such content in a different way than posts or pages. - Let’s take a look at a real-life scenario. Assume you manage a movie review website where you post movie reviews as well as other movie-related stuff.
Your movie reviews, on the other hand, have proven extremely popular with your readership. You may make your movie reviews more useful by adding star ratings and making them searchable by actor names, genre, and other criteria.
In this situation, you’ll need to make a specific post type for movie reviews, as well as a custom taxonomy for sorting actors and genres.
This allows your visitors to quickly browse through your movie reviews rather than your entire WordPress blog.
A portfolio is another frequent example for creatives such as photographers and graphic designers.
It’s easy to get buried in the rest of your content if you’re merely sharing your work in a blog post. Your visitors will be able to effortlessly navigate through all of your work if you create a distinct portfolio custom post type.
You may also construct a custom taxonomy for each sort of portfolio project if you have a range of various categories of work in your portfolio.
We hope this article has helped you understand why custom post types and taxonomies are necessary in WordPress.
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