Are you looking for a quick way to merge and bulk edit categories / tags in WordPress? After a while, most WordPress blogs need some spring cleaning. Sometimes this requires moving posts between categories and tags or merging similar categories and tags together. In this article, we will show you how to easily merge and bulk edit categories and tags in WordPress.
When Do You Need to Merge Categories and Tags in WordPress?
Many users are not aware of how to properly use categories and tags when starting a new WordPress blog.
After a while, they have too many categories or tags. Some of these categories are not active and tags with just a single post.
A lot of time, you may find that your categories or tags are too similar and can be filed under a single category or tag.
One way to solve this is by editing each post and reassign categories and tags. However, it will take too much time, and you may still miss some posts.
The easier solution is to bulk edit and merge categories / tags in WordPress.
Merge and Bulk Edit Categories and Tags in WordPress
First thing you need to do is install and activate the Term Management Tools plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you need to visit Posts » Categories page and click on the ‘Bulk actions’ dropdown menu.
You will see new bulk actions added to the interface. Here are the things you can do with these bulk actions.
You can merge categories, tags, or terms in a custom taxonomy.
You can move all terms from one taxonomy to another. For example, you can move all your categories to tags.
You can quickly assign a parent category to multiple categories.
Categories and tags help you organize content on your website. This help users easily locate the content they want to view. Properly using categories and tags is also good for boosting your search engine rankings.
We recommend that you go through the process of category / tag clean up every year to keep your site organized.
We hope this article helped you easily merge and bulk edit categories and tags in WordPress. You may also want to see our step by step WordPress SEO guide for beginners.
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This plugin “Term Management Tools” no longer exists on the WordPress plugin repository.
The plugin is still available but has not been updated. We will be sure to take a look into alternatives
I have been spring cleaning my tags and categories. I would like to update a number of posts with the correct tags. I downloaded several of your suggestions like Simple Tag.
What I want to do: I have a tag ‘Health’ and a number of exisiting posts about the local hospital. Can I do a search on content and add tag to posts.
thank you. I wish I had found you earlier!!
After you merge or convert tags with this plug-in, does the original tag URL merge with it, or does it a create a 404 error that then results in the creation of a 301 redirect? Thanks!
I had just completed the task of rationalizing categories categories and tags when I discovered – too late – this post. My question is this: I have made the changes on WordPress, but I have not made the myriad of redirections using the Redirection plug-in (mainly because I don’t understand what information to fill in). If I do not redirect, will that be a major problem for searchers using search engines?
People coming from search to a category or tag page will see a 404 error. If a lot of your traffic lands on such pages, then you will loose significant traffic.
Uncategorized is actually also a category and you can move its posts using the plugin just like all other categories.
What about bulk moving uncategorized posts to another category? There’s no checkbox for the uncategroized option.
Jason that’s because unlike categories, Tags are not hierarchical and can not have parent or child tags. Please take a look at our guide on Categories vs Tags.
I’m not sure why I didn’t reply to this when I saw it the first time. I felt a bit dunce. You’re right and I was overlooking that. Thanks for the response.
I must be missing something here. I thought I’d run over and check it out, but I can’t see an option for parent/child tags.
works well but can not bulk delete cats from multiple posts. Thats a big problem when you want to delete a category from a post but not actually delete the cat itself
This is great, but you might want to touch on 301 redirects for the post that are merging into a new category or your probably going to be losing a lot of search enginge traffic.
That would only impact you if your posts use category in their permalink structure like our site does. In that case, you would need to use a plugin like Redirection:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-track-404-pages-and-redirect-them-in-wordpress/
This will take care of most things for you.
I’m sorry to be a dolt, but I’m trying to figure out if this is what I’m looking for. I want to change my categories all together and remove some, make some child categories, etc. It’s not really about moving posts for me, it’s about the category structure. Is this plugin still what I need to use?
You can use this plugin to merge two categories.
thanks now i can clean out my blog from unwanted tags…just one question i wanted to ask…will the deleted tags and categories get removed from posts and will it effect my SEO…as they will ultimately lead to 404 errors in GWT…
Thanks for this post… I was wondering what I was going to do with some of those clumsy categories that no longer look like such a good idea! Now I have a starting point.
Cheers,
Bill
Wish I had know about this when I started tidying up my blog some time ago. This has made me get rid of all the uncategorised post on my blog. Additionally this organisation is helping me focus the post on my blog. I already use another plugin that creates pages based on Categories.
Keep the good work coming!
Can this tool also add new tags quickly to posts? Because i imported like 500 messages from my old website where i did not use wordpress and tags.
Bjorn you can try the bulk edit mode in Posts > All Posts. If all 500 messages are imported as posts and you have a limited number of categories then you can select multiple posts and assign them tags.
Man, this couldn’t have come at a better time. I was just staring at my personal website, which is pretty old, in utter dismay. I have 399 tags that have accumulated over the years, as well as categories that are ancient, and was dreading cleaning up such a huge mess. I’m going to put this plugin to the test!