How to Exclude a Category From Your WordPress Homepage

By default, Word­Press dis­plays all cate­go­ries on the blog page. Howe­ver, some­ti­mes you may not want to dis­play indi­vi­du­al cate­go­ries. Today we show you how you can cus­to­mi­ze the blog post page with just a few lines of code to exclude sin­gle or mul­ti­ple cate­go­ries.

Exclude a category from the WordPress blog using PHP #

To exclude the indi­vi­du­al cate­go­ries, we need to add a few lines of code in your child the­me. To do this, open the functions.php file loca­ted in the root direc­to­ry of your child the­me. At the end of the file, add the fol­lo­wing code.

/**
 * Remove a single Category from the Blog Page
 */
function exclude_categories_posts($query){
    if(!$query->is_home() || !$query->is_main_query() ){
        return $query;
    }
    $query->set('cat', '-1');
    return $query;
}

add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'exclude_categories_posts');

Then just replace the ID (-1) with the ID of your cate­go­ry.

Important: Make sure that you put the minus sign (-) in front of the ID.

Of cour­se, the same can be done direct­ly for mul­ti­ple cate­go­ries. To do this, chan­ge the code as shown in the fol­lo­wing exam­p­le.

/**
 * Remove multiple Categories from the Blog Page
 */
function exclude_categories_posts($query){
    if(!$query->is_home() || !$query->is_main_query() ){
        return $query;
    }
    $query->set('cat', '-1,-2,-3,-4');
    return $query;
}

add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'exclude_categories_posts');

Just replace the IDs (-1,-2,-3,-4,-5) with your cate­go­ry IDs to exclude them from your blog page.

Tha­t’s it. We hope this artic­le hel­ped you to hide one or more cate­go­ries from your blog page.