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Why WordPress Categories Break in Zapier Automations (and How to Fix It)
Posts arriving broken in WordPress from Airtable via Zapier? The culprit is usually custom taxonomy formatting. Here's why it happens and three ways to fix it.
When you're automating content from Airtable to WordPress via Zapier, one of the most common "almost works" bugs looks like this: posts arrive in WordPress, but when you preview them, the layout is broken or the categories are missing entirely. Click Save Draft inside WordPress and suddenly the post renders perfectly. Everything was there all along—the problem is specifically how custom taxonomy and category data was passed.
Here's what's happening and three ways to fix it.
The Symptom
Your Zapier workflow runs, a post appears in WordPress, but the preview is broken. If you open the post in the WordPress editor and save it manually—without changing anything—the preview corrects itself. This tells you the content is fine. The issue is with taxonomy data arriving in a format WordPress can't immediately resolve on receipt.
Why It Happens
WordPress's REST API expects custom taxonomy values (categories, tags, custom terms) to be submitted as a comma-separated string when passed from an external automation. If your Airtable records store these values in a multi-select field or as an array, Zapier may pass them in a raw, serialized, or unformatted structure that WordPress's backend can't cleanly parse.
This mismatch is especially common when:
- You've applied a formatting fix on staging but it hasn't been deployed to production yet
- The staging and production WordPress environments use slightly different configurations for the REST API or the integration plugin
- An update to the plugin changed how it expects taxonomy data to be serialized
Three Ways to Fix It
Option 1: Format Categories as a Comma-Separated String in Zapier
Add a Formatter by Zapier step before your WordPress action. Use Text → Join and set the separator to a comma. This takes the raw array or multi-select output from Airtable and converts it into
Category A, Category B, Category C before it's passed to WordPress.This is the most reliable fix and keeps the logic entirely inside Zapier—no changes needed on the WordPress side.
Option 2: Confirm the Production API Serialization Format
If you've already applied a comma-string fix on staging but it's still broken on production, the environments may expect data in a different format. Ask your WordPress developer to confirm:
- Does the production endpoint expect a comma-separated string, a JSON array, or an array of integer term IDs?
- Was the plugin update that enabled the staging fix deployed to production?
Once you know the expected format, update the Formatter step in Zapier to match.
Option 3: Ship V1 Without Categories, Fix Iteratively
If the category issue is holding up a launch and everything else in the automation is working, consider shipping a v1 without categories populated automatically. Posts will arrive in WordPress with the correct title, body, and metadata—just without category assignments. A quick manual review step handles the rest while you work on the fix in parallel.
This lets your team start capturing the time savings immediately, rather than waiting for a 100% complete solution.
Testing Your Fix
After applying the change, create a fresh test record in Airtable and verify:
- The post appears in the correct section or resource type in WordPress
- Categories and custom taxonomy terms are assigned correctly
- The post preview renders without breaking—no manual save required
If the fix works in staging but not production, the most likely cause is a plugin or API configuration difference between environments. Confirm with your developer that taxonomy serialization settings match on both sides.
The Bigger Picture
Airtable-to-WordPress pipelines via Zapier are powerful but require careful alignment between how data is structured in Airtable and what the WordPress REST API expects on the other end. The category formatting issue is one of the most common friction points, but it's also one of the most fixable once you know where to look.
Dealing with a stubborn WordPress taxonomy issue in your automation? Our team has helped enterprise content teams work through complex Zapier + WordPress integration challenges. Book a free discovery call and let's get it sorted.
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