How to Add Blog Categories in Shopify (Without a Category Field)

Shopify blog categories don't exist, but tags, separate blogs and a category menu do the job. Here's how to set each one up.

Marti BeleguSenior Developer · Founder of Filter My BlogPublished October 23, 2026Updated November 7, 20266 min read

Shopify blog categories don't exist as a separate feature: there's no category field on a blog post. You build them from tags instead. Give every article in a category the same tag, and Shopify creates a category page at /blogs/<blog>/tagged/<tag>. Then show those links to readers with a menu or a filter bar above your posts.

That's the whole trick. The hard part is the planning, and making the categories visible, because most themes never link to tag pages. This guide covers three ways to set up categories, how to keep "category" tags apart from the other tags you use, and what each option looks like to readers.

If you want the full background on tags first, Shopify Blog Tags: The Complete Guide covers how they work. This post is about using them as categories.

Why Shopify blogs have no categories

WordPress gives you two ways to group posts: categories (a fixed hierarchy) and tags (loose labels). Shopify kept only one of them. Tags on Shopify behave more like WordPress categories than you'd expect:

• Every tag has its own page, with its own URL, listing only the articles that carry it.
• Liquid can list every tag in a blog, so a theme can print them as links.
• An article can carry several, so a post can sit in "Recipes" and "Summer" at once.

What's missing is the hierarchy (no "Recipes → Desserts") and anything that separates category tags from all your other tags. Both have workarounds, covered below.

Option 1: Use tags as categories (the usual answer)

This is what most Shopify stores should do. You keep one blog and turn a small set of tags into categories.

Step 1: Pick your category list

Write down 5 to 10 categories before you touch the admin. Good categories are things a reader would browse by:

• For a skincare store: Routines, Ingredients, Skin types, Behind the scenes
• For a coffee roaster: Brew guides, Origins, Recipes, News

Decide the exact spelling, including capitals and singular or plural. "Recipe" and "Recipes" are two different tags, with two different pages.

Step 2: Tag every article

In your Shopify admin, open Blog posts, click an article, type the category into the Tags box and save. Give every article at least one category tag. If a post doesn't fit any category, that's a sign your list is missing one.

You can add other tags too, like "Beginner" or "Summer". The next section covers keeping those apart from your categories.

Step 3: Find your category URLs

Each category page lives at:

/blogs/<blog-handle>/tagged/<tag-handle>

The tag handle is the tag in lowercase with spaces turned into hyphens. For a blog called journal and a tag called Brew Guides, that's /blogs/journal/tagged/brew-guides. Open it in your browser to check it lists the right posts.

Step 4: Show the categories to readers

A category page nobody can find doesn't help. Three ways to link to them, from simplest to most complete:

1. A navigation menu. Under Online Store → Navigation, add a "Blog" menu item with the category URLs nested under it. This gives you a dropdown in the header, the closest thing to a classic category menu.
2. A Liquid tag list above your posts. How to Filter Shopify Blog Posts by Tag has a copy-and-paste snippet that prints every tag as a button.
3. A filter app. Filter My Blog adds a styled category bar above your posts, with no code.

Keep category tags apart from other tags

Once you use tags for categories and for other things, your tag list gets mixed: "Brew guides", "Beginner", "featured", "homepage-slider". You only want readers to see the first kind as categories.

There are two ways to keep them apart.

Hide the non-category tags. Keep your categories as plain names and hide everything else from the tag list readers see. In a Liquid snippet, that means skipping some tags in the loop:

{%- assign category_tags = 'Brew Guides,Origins,Recipes,News' | split: ',' -%}
{%- for tag in blog.all_tags -%}
  {%- if category_tags contains tag -%}
    <a href="{{ blog.url }}/tagged/{{ tag | handleize }}">{{ tag }}</a>
  {%- endif -%}
{%- endfor -%}

The list in the first line decides what counts as a category. The catch is that you have to edit the code each time you add a category.

Or use a prefix. Some stores tag categories as cat-recipes, cat-origins and so on, and filter on the prefix. It's easy to filter in code, but the prefix shows up in the URL (/tagged/cat-recipes) and anywhere else the theme prints the tag, so readers see it unless you rename it for display.

With Filter My Blog, you don't need either. Switch off the tags that aren't categories and they disappear from the bar, while staying on your articles. You can also rename a tag for display, so cat-recipes reads as "Recipes", and drag your categories into the order you want. See showing, hiding and renaming tags.

Option 2: Use separate blogs as categories

Shopify lets you create more than one blog under Content → Blog posts → Manage blogs. Each blog has its own URL (/blogs/recipes, /blogs/news) and its own listing page, so each one can act as a category.

This works well when the sections are truly separate. Readers of your "Press" blog don't browse your "Recipes" blog, and the two don't need to share a page.

It works badly as a general category system:

• An article belongs to exactly one blog. A summer recipe can't be in "Recipes" and "Summer" at once.
• There's no listing of everything. Each blog has its own page, so there's no single page that shows all your posts.
• Moving an article to another blog changes its URL. Old links break unless you add a redirect under Online Store → Navigation → URL redirects.
• Tags don't cross blogs. A "Summer" tag in two blogs gives two separate tag pages.

A good rule: use separate blogs for sections, and tags for categories inside a section. Most stores need one blog. Filter My Blog handles multiple blogs, each with its own tags and order, if you do have several.

Option 3: Sub-categories with combined tags

Shopify has no category hierarchy, but you can get something close. Tag an article with both the parent and the child, say Recipes and Desserts, and link to the combination:

/blogs/journal/tagged/recipes+desserts

That page lists articles carrying both tags. Shopify combines tags with AND only, so this gives you a "Recipes → Desserts" page.

Two things to know before you lean on this:

• A combination can match nothing. Two real tags that never appear on the same article give a valid page with zero posts, and most themes show a blank grid.
• Search engines are told not to crawl it. Shopify's default robots.txt disallows blog URLs containing +, so combination pages won't rank. Single-tag pages are crawlable, so make your important categories single tags.

For most blogs, a flat list of 5 to 10 categories is easier for readers than a hierarchy anyway.

What about metafields?

You can add an article metafield called "Category" and show it on each post. It looks tidy in the admin, but Shopify doesn't build a page for each metafield value, and there's no URL that lists articles by metafield. You'd get a label on each post but no category pages, which is the part readers use. Tags are still the better tool.

Which option should you use?

For nearly every store: one blog, 5 to 10 category tags, and a visible bar of category links above your posts. If you'd rather not maintain code for that bar, Filter My Blog's free plan covers every blog with up to 12 tags each, which is plenty for a category list. See pricing for what the paid plans add.