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How to find the WordPress category ID in your WordPress dashboard

For some WordPress widgets, themes or plugins you need to enter the category ID to filter posts based on categories. Since WordPress version 2.5 category IDs are not displayed anymore on the WordPress admin pages. But how to find WordPress category IDs after they have been removed? In this tutorial you’ll learn two different ways to find category IDs in WordPress. One is simply possible out of the box and the second one requires installing and using a particular WordPress plugin.

When using our WordPress themes, you can filter categories within certain widgets, like for example MH Slider, MH Custom Posts, MH Category Columns, MH Carousel and many more depending on the particular theme you are using. In addition to selecting a particular category, you can filter content from multiple categories by simply entering one or more category IDs in the widget form field. This tutorial including video sequences covers the few simple steps to find the correct category ID.

How to find the category ID in your WordPress dashboard

In your WordPress dashboard under Posts => Categories you can find an overview of your available categories. If there are no categories available yet, you have to create categories first. To find out the ID for specific categories you can simply hover with your mouse over the category name and in the status bar (usually lower left corner of your browser) you will now see a URL popping up.

Category
Hover with your cursor over a category

This URL contains the ID of the particular category and appears behind the term tag (tag_ID=202). You can now use this ID number (which is 202 in our example) and make use of the ID within widgets or other features to display posts from this category. To show posts from more than one category, you can enter multiple category IDs and separate them by commas like so: 202, 25, 7, 19.

Category ID
What you see as “tag_ID” is the category ID

See the video tutorial: How to find the category ID in WordPress

Please note: If you are using the Safari Browser, you might not have a status bar without installing a browser extension. In that case, please click on Edit for the particular category and check the address bar of your browser on the next page to reveal the category ID.

With this first approach, you can now easily find the WordPress category ID in your WordPress dashboard and use it wherever you like. In case you have trouble finding category IDs with the above mentioned method or if you need to collect several IDs and if you are looking for a more efficient way to find WordPress category IDs, you could use a suitable plugin as explained below.

Using a plugin to display category IDs in WordPress

In case you don’t want to look up the category ID each time or if you need several IDs at once, then you can also make use of helpful plugins which display the category IDs automatically. A suitable plugin for this purpose would be the Reveal IDs Plugin. Navigate to Plugins => Add New in your dashboard and enter the name of this or any other plugin you would like to use for this purpose.

Plugin Reveal IDs
Reveal IDs Plugin – Image Source: Screenshot (WordPress.org)

You can install and activate the Reveal IDs plugin as you would do with any other plugin in WordPress. After the Reveal IDs plugin has been activated, you can navigate to Posts => Categories in your WordPress dashboard and the category IDs will be displayed accordingly. Please note, if you’re using any other plugin for this purpose, then this process might be slightly different.

See the video tutorial: Using a plugin to display category IDs

How to use WordPress category IDs in widgets or else

If your website is running with one of our WordPress themes, you usually can make use of the category ID to filter posts in widgets like MH Custom Posts, MH Slider or else. After you’ve located the particular category IDs, just enter one or more WordPress category ID(s) into the provided field and save your settings. To enter more than one category, please separate the IDs with commas.

As soon as you have provided all preferred category IDs, the widget will display only posts related to the particular category or categories which you have entered. When using custom widgets by MH Themes you will not only be able to filter posts based on categories but based on tags as well. In case you want to filter posts based on tags, just enter the tag slug (tag name you can find in URLs) into the field Filter Posts by Tags and the widget will display posts based on your provided tags. If you want to enter more than one tag, please separate the tags by commas.

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