You may have noticed that website sidebars, especially blogs, display the most popular tags: word clouds are often associated with numbers that lead your visitors to a topic they are interested in. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how show most popular tags on your WordPress website. But first, we need to spend some time talking about why and when they are used. If you’re confident in your knowledge of WordPress taxonomies, feel free to head over to the how-to section.
Tags and categories are taxonomies – ways to organize and sort content in WordPress. They are important for your visitors because they make it easier for them to find what they want and are also useful for SEO purposes. As such, this is a topic worth sinking your teeth into: no one wants low SEO scores or bad UX.
The categories are the broader of the two, generalized way of grouping content. A post can belong to more than one category (like “News” and “Sports”), but it’s best not to overdo it because that’s the only way they get watered down.
But tags have much less to do with logical hierarchies. Tags work like keywords: they used to indicate what your posts are about. Unlike categories, posts are expected to have a larger number of tags. For example, if you are writing about Russian and Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, you can send the post to “Shostakovich”, “Russia”, “Classical Music”, “20. You can label it as “century”, “symphonies” and “USSR”. example. Taken together, tags should give the reader a general idea of what the content is about and lead him to similar items.
You can edit your tags from the tags screen in your WordPress dashboard. you can go here Posts/Tags. You can edit tags separately for each post from: Posts/All Posts using the screen Quick edit to command. Still, it’s easier to assign tags to posts when editing. A labels box is located on the right side of the post edit screen.
And all this just barely touches taxonomies. If you want to learn more about organizing your WordPress content, check out our detailed guide on WordPress categories and tags.
Now that we know what tags are, it’s also important to note that your visitors will use them to navigate to thematically relevant content. A word cloud containing the most popular tags can often be found as part of a sidebar or footer, while tag strings can often be found in the header and footer of a post, but can be made to its own page or indeed. whatever you feel best suits your website design. But how do you display it?
WordPress comes with a widget whose function is to display the most popular tags. We’ll show you how to do it using our Bridge theme, but it works pretty much the same as any theme. First, go to: Appearance/Widgets.
Next, find the widget you want, in our case Tag Cloud Select the widget and drag it to where you want to see it on your page layout. We chose Footer Column 2 widget area, but you can choose the widget area you want – the sidebar, for example, is a particularly common spot for tags. Also note that different themes may have different or differently named widget areas.
Next, you need to configure the widget. In our case, the widget is a Titleand we chose Most Popular Tags. If this field is left blank, the title of this custom widget will simply be read. labels.
we also left taxonomy menu by default labels adjustment. This particular widget can be used for other purposes, but that is beyond the scope of this demonstration. We will also need Save our settings.
And that’s really all. When you load your footer, your most popular tags will be where you put them.
But what if the default widget is not working for you?
The tag cloud widget is a default WordPress widget that can be used regardless of the theme you are using. Now, the default widget is fine but limited in terms of settings and styling options. If you want a more flexible look and more functionality, view your most popular tags using a plugin.
we recommend Awesome Tag Cloud Addition. Not only does it display your labels using graphics in the style of real paper labels, it also has a number of style options available to you. make the tag cloud better match your website: shuffle or stand out. After installing and activating the plugin you will get a special widget: Cool Tag Cloud widget.
find in Appearance/Widgets and drag it wherever you want. we will use Footer Column 2 widget area.
Next, you will need to configure this plugin. This plugin offers many options, but we will focus on the most basic. First, we see Title domain. We will give our widget a name Most Popular Tags. Next up, we have some styling options that we won’t be using, but that you can use to choose a font and the font that best fits your website’s style, such as font type, size, and weight. we will change display style with Greenbecause it fits our theme more.
Scroll down and you’ll find some other styling options. we will leave Image alignment on the left, select Yup for Animation on hoverand leave None for Text conversion. We won’t touch the maximum tag limit, but Sort tags by: to countmeans the number of views and Label order direction with Decreasing. we will not touch taxonomy leaving the field labels. this clue we will leave Yup by default and Show post counts with Yup. We will not use any of the other options, but scroll all the way down and click. Save.
And now our footer will contain a list of tags and a hover animation with the number of posts used, similar to actual tags.
This plugin also provides you with a shortcode if you want. Simply paste [cool_tag_cloud] wherever you want and your Cool Tag Cloud will be displayed.
As a result
Here it is, it’s easy to add the most popular tag cloud to your WordPress website. With just a few clicks of the mouse, you can give your visitors an easy, at-a-glance overview of what your website content is about, what are the most common topics, helping them find exactly the content they want. they’re after, new content they didn’t even know they were interested in before. In any case, an overview of the most popular tags is a feature that many website visitors look forward to today. And meeting the expectations of your visitors is often not the case.
Support our work ❤️
If you enjoyed this article, consider leaving a tip to help us keep publishing great content.
