Easily Move, Merge, and Convert WordPress Categories & Tags

Untangle Your WordPress Taxonomy!

While doing some work on my SEO, I realized I was long overdue to clean up the mess I’d made (back when I was a novice to WP taxonomies) of my blog’s tags and category structure…

Unfortunately, I mucked them up pretty good… and getting them back compliant with “best practices” is taking some really serious (and time consuming) work.

Broadly speaking, for actual organizational use, you want your site to have 5-6 categories that are keyword related to the main focus of the site. Categories are your broad groups. Each post belongs in one category and certainly no more than two.

Tags are your “folders” within your file cabinets and can be used much more generously. You want to aim to put a post into several, but no more than 8, tags.

Like many bloggers, I initially tried to use categories to serve the function of tags… and I have the resulting organizational crisis to show for it!

WordPress Plugin: Term Management Tools

Stars: (5/5)

This plugin is a super simple to use one-trick-wonder for re-organizing your WordPress tags and categories.

This is not a plugin for daily use… you will install it, use it and then uninstall it with a sigh of success and relief!

The plugin gives you the ability to merge tags, merge categories, convert tags to categories, convert categories to tags, and to quickly assign parents to categories.

While we could certainly merge tags manually from within the database that’s messy and risky business.

There is no “settings” menu for the plugin as it simply adds drop-down options to the top of both the “Tags” and “Categories” pages in your WordPress admin dashboard.

At this time, the plugin is well supported well supported and reasonably current (and working on WP 3.4.2).

You may never need this plugin, but if you do, I highly recommend it!

PS: One feature I’d like to see added would be the ability to add the contents of one tag to a new tag without actually “merging”. For example, to add my “WordPress” tag to a “CMS” tag.

Read more:

Messy Tags Are Destroying Your Blog

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