Categories

Categories form the tree that customers browse in your store. You use them to decide where each product belongs and which URL it gets.

The admin page at Catalog → Categories does two jobs, and a switch moves you between them. You can manage the categories you already have, or you can browse Google's product taxonomy and import the categories that match your catalog.

A product needs at least one category before you can publish it. No product reaches the storefront without a place in the tree.

Importing from Google's taxonomy

Turn on Browse to add to explore Google's product taxonomy, which has roughly 5,500 nodes. You open the branches and select the categories you want.

Litestore only loads the taxonomy when you switch to that view. Managing your existing categories stays fast, however large the taxonomy is.

You don't have to use the taxonomy. You can create your own categories, and they appear in the same tree as the imported ones.

A real tree

Each category can have a parent.

Litestore builds the storefront URL from the category's full path through the tree. Where you nest a category is therefore also where customers find it.

When you rename a category, Litestore redirects the old path to the new one. Links that customers saved and pages that search engines indexed keep working.

What a category carries

Each category has these fields:

• a name and slug
• an optional display label
• a description
• an icon or illustration, which the storefront Categories block shows
• its parent
• the products linked to it

Its own page and SEO

Every category gets its own storefront page. Litestore builds the page's URL from the category's full path through the tree.

The page shows these things:

• breadcrumbs
• the category's products
• its own meta title and description
• collection structured data for search engines

A category can also appear in the Categories block. You use that block when you are building a page and want to show your categories on it.

Translations without moving the URL

To translate a category, add a locale and enter a translated name, label, description and meta fields.

The canonical path stays the same. The translation gets its own localized path, so adding a language doesn't move the URL the original category already had.

Where to start

Build or import the tree before you publish products. A category is one of the five things a product needs before you can publish it, and a product without one stays in draft.

Nest categories the way your customers browse, because the path through the tree becomes the storefront URL.

Use the Google taxonomy when standard category names suit your catalog. Write your own categories when they don't.

Related