Pinterest Board Sections Planner

Quick answer: a Pinterest board section is a sub-folder inside a board. Add sections when a board has grown big enough to be hard to browse, a few hundred pins, and name each one plainly for the part of the board it holds: "Chicken", "Slow Cooker", "Vegetarian" inside an "Easy Dinner Recipes" board. Keep it to a handful. Type your boards and their pin counts above for a verdict on each and sections to copy.

How to use it

1. Pick your niche. You see sections for its first three board ideas, from our board name generator.
2. Type your own boards, one per line, with the number of pins if you know it: "Easy Dinner Recipes, 340". Each board gets a verdict and sections by angle: by meal, by diet, by method, by season, and so on for your niche.
3. Tap a section to copy it and paste it into Pinterest's "Section" box, or copy the whole plan.
4. Paste the sections you already have to see which to rename or merge.

What Pinterest says about sections

• What they are: "Use board sections to organize Pins within your board." That is Pinterest's help centre; its API says the same: "Sections help organize pins within a board."
• How long a name can be: 1 to 180 characters, in Pinterest's API. The help centre gives no length, and the app offers "suggested names" when you make one.
• How many a board can hold: Pinterest publishes no number, in its help centre or its API. We have not found one we could quote, so this page names none.
• Merging: in Pinterest's words, "When you merge a board into another board, the followers of the merged board will not transfer to the new board", and "To undo a merge, you’ll need to create a new board or section and move the Pins there, one by one".

When a board needs sections (our rule of thumb)

This is PinPinterest's advice, not a Pinterest rule, from our guide to board sections: sections for size, boards for topics.

• Under 50 pins: skip sections. A small board does not need sub-folders, and a section puts a click between visitors and your pins.
• 50 to 199 pins: optional. Add a few once the board is hard to browse.
• 200 pins or more: sections help. A handful, three to eight, lets visitors jump to what they came for.

If a section is something people search for as its own thing, like "Slow Cooker Recipes", it may deserve its own board, where it can be found and followed. Our keyword checker tells you whether people save pins for it. A section inside a board that already works keeps that board strong; splitting it into five new boards spreads its pins thin.

Naming sections

Name a section for what is in it, in plain words, the same "clear over clever" idea as board names. "Chicken" and "Slow Cooker" tell a visitor where to tap; "Misc", "Other" and "Stuff" do not. A section does not need to repeat the board's name, because it is always seen inside the board. The checker above flags a vague name, a name over Pinterest's 180 characters, a name that is the board's own, and two sections with the same name.

FAQ