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Categories are the menu of your website. They’re how a customer who lands on your home page finds their way to the thing they want to book. They’re also part of every web address on your site, so they shape how your pages are organised and how search engines understand them.
In the admin portal, categories live under Settings → Catalogue → Categories.

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Why categories matter more than they look

Three things depend on them:
  1. Nothing appears on your website without one. A service or package that isn’t in a category has a page, but no menu links to it. Customers can’t find it.
  2. They’re in the web address. yourbusiness.com.au/richmond/driving-lessons/manual-lesson — the middle part is the category slug.
  3. They set the order. Which service appears first in a category is decided on the category, not on the service.

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How many to create

Enough that a customer can tell where to click, and no more. A driving school might have just Driving lessons and Test packages. A salon might have Cuts, Colour, and Treatments. If you find yourself with a category holding one service, it probably doesn’t need to exist. You can nest one level deep — “Colour” with “Highlights” under it — when a category genuinely has enough in it to need splitting up. Don’t nest by default.

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Add a category

1

Open Categories

Go to Settings → Catalogue → Categories, then add a category. To create a sub-category, add it under an existing one.
2

Fill in the details

Work through the settings below.
3

Save

Then add services to it — see Choose what’s in a category.

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The details

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Category name

What customers read in your website’s menu, and in the breadcrumb trail at the top of every service page inside it. Use the words a customer would use. “Colour” beats “Chemical services”. “Driving lessons” beats “Tuition”.

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Slug

The category’s part of the web address. Lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens.
Because this sits in the address of every service inside the category, it’s worth a moment’s thought — and worth avoiding changing later, because every link into those pages breaks.

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Description

A short description shown to customers on the category page. Use it to explain what’s in the category when the name alone doesn’t say enough.

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Colour

An accent colour used for this category.

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Internal notes

Notes for your team only. Never shown to customers.

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Meta title, meta description, meta keywords

Text for search engines. The meta description is the grey summary under your link in Google results for the category page. Write the meta description as a sentence to a customer, not a list of words — around 150 characters, saying what they’ll find in this category and where you serve.

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Choose what’s in a category, and its order

Open a category and you’ll find a Services section and a Service Bundles section. Each is a two-sided picker:
1

Add

Tick items on the left and choose Add to put them in this category.
2

Remove

Tick items on the right and choose Remove to take them out.
3

Reorder

Select a single item on the right, then use Move up / Move down. This order is the order customers see them on your website.
4

Save changes

Nothing is applied until you save.
Put your most popular or best-value service first. It’s the one most customers will click.
You can also tick categories from the service or package itself, on its General tab. That adds it to the category, but the order can only be set from the category.

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Things worth knowing

Deleting a category doesn’t delete the services in it. They stay, but they’re no longer in that category — and if that was their only category, they disappear from your website until you put them somewhere else. A service can sit in more than one category. When it does, pick a primary category on the service — that’s the one used in its breadcrumb trail.