How to bulk change post categories and tags in Wordpress

bysmartketeer

6.8K followers

5 years ago

Many beginners, site owners and Wordpress users get confused about categories and tags, so before anything else, let's define the terms ....

Both categories and tags are known as taxonomies, and their purpose is to improve the usability of your website by sorting out your content. In plain English: the categories and tags will allow users to easily browse through your content by topic rather than browsing chronologically the entire blogroll.

Basically, the categories are the main topics of your site. Think of these as broad groups of your posts. They will help your readers to find the right type of content within your site. And of course, they are hierarchical, so you can sub-categories too ...

The tags are used to describe specific details of your posts. In other words, tags are the micro-data that you can use to micro-categorize the content of your post(s). And they are NOT hierarchical!

In a different approach: the categories are representing the table of contents for your site, while the tags are your site’s index words.

For example, if you have a lifestyle blog, you could have categories like family, finances, hobbies, health & beauty, travel, food, etc. And when you write an article about cooking, you'll add it in the food category, using the appropriate index word(s) as tag(s), for example pasta, roast, breakfast, etc.

The biggest difference between categories and tags: you must define a category for your post (otherwise will be marked as "uncategorized"), but you are not required to add any tags.

But, here's the thing ... As your site grows, you'll want to use more categories and tags ... And eventually, you may end up using too many! Believe me, it's a very common scenario ...

So, you'll have to sort things out! Now depending on how many posts, sub-topics, products, etc you have, this could be a daunting and extremely annoying task ...

But of course, there is an easy solution ... And I've decided to create a short tutorial where I will show you how to bulk move your posts to categories and tags in Wordpress.

Interested?

Here it is:

How to bulk change post categories and tags in Wordpress

Enjoy it!