Why and How to Use WordPress Taxonomies

taxonomy It’s not exactly a term we come across every day. Still, taxonomies are a very important and very useful concept in WordPress. In fact, if you’re a WordPress user, you’ve probably used them a lot without even knowing what they’re called. If you are planning to start a successful blog or magazine, now is the time to learn more about the concept of WordPress taxonomies.

Correct use of taxonomies Greatly improve the impression your website or blog makes on your visitors (by building on their experience), so we decided to make things clear for our readers, starting with why it’s important to apply classification best practices and how to actually do it.

What Are WordPress Taxonomies?

In short, WordPress taxonomies categories and tags. More precisely, these are the default taxonomies out of the box, but you can also create your own custom taxonomies if you want.

As you probably know, categories and tags serve to group posts together. The purpose of this is to allow your users to quickly find the content they are looking for.

Let’s say you have a travel blog with posts covering destinations all over the world. If you group them by continent, for example, it will be easier for your visitors to find relevant content. So anyone who wants to read about Africa can find all the articles about Africa easily somehow.

By adding more taxonomies, specifically categories and tags, to WordPress, you can group posts further and increase your chances of serving your visitors exactly what they’re looking for. For example, beaches, mountains, urban areas, medieval architecture, local nightlife, etc. You can group all posts about A visitor looking for an article about beaches in Africa or nightlife in Seoul will find this content in just a few clicks.

When your visitors find what they’re interested in by simply clicking on a listing instead of searching through all the posts on your site, their user intent (what they came for) is fulfilled, and this is crucial for user retention. loyalty.

Taxonomies actually exist more in our lives than we know, especially in our digital experiences. Consider Netflix, for example. When you’re in the mood for a rom-com, you choose the appropriate category and your guilty pleasure is immediately presented to you. nowadays, users are used to getting what they need right awaywith literally zero latency and no website, platform or service can afford to use classifications.

What Are the Default WordPress Taxonomies?

As we mentioned earlier, WordPress uses two types of taxonomy by default:

These two types of classification are so similar that it causes confusion as to which one to use and when. And yet, their actual uses are quite different.

Before everything, tags are more specific while categories are more general. Think of categories as boxes or folders to categorize your content and labels as tags or small tags that describe the content in more detail.

Next, categories are hierarchical, while tags are non-hierarchical.. This means you can have main categories and subcategories that fit together, like Russian dolls. You can’t do this with tags that are always individual and independent.

One of the biggest differences between categories and tags is that in WordPress, categories are required, tags are optional. Every WordPress post must have a category. If you don’t add it yourself, WordPress will add the pretty pointless “uncategorized” category.

From a technical standpoint, a post can be divided into several different categories. Adding 2-3 different categories to a post won’t break your blog, but it might not be such a good idea. Actually, If you need to assign more than one category to each post you publish, you probably didn’t have your categories set up correctly.means they are too specific or narrow. It would probably be a good idea to rethink your categories and move some to subcategories or even tags.

As for tags, they can be as narrow as a pinhole and you can only have tags applied to a single post.

If you look around the web, it’s likely that most blogs (or at least most successful blogs) are just up to 10 or 15 categories maximum, but with hundreds of counted tags.

How to Create Categories and Tags and Rank Your WordPress Posts

As a convenient and time-saving method, you can create your categories and tags just before you start publishing the posts, or create them later. This second method is probably more common, as many bloggers can’t immediately tell which topics they will cover and what categories and tags they will need.

To get started, go to: Submit > Categories or Submit > Tags.

Both have the same fields, but the categories also family category choice. On the left you will find fields to enter the name, information, description and main category (as we mentioned, this last option is not available for tags). On the right you will see a list of all the categories/tags you have created so far.

Any categories and tags you create can be edited or deleted later. In To count column, you can see how many posts are using a particular category or tag.

Once you’ve created your categories and tags, adding posts to one (or more) of them is super simple. In your Dashboard, navigate to the post you want to categorize and to the right of the editor, you will see the category field. check the category you want to refer to the post.

Here you can also add a new category without the option to enter any specific information.

The tag area is located just below the category area. You will notice that there is no option to add a new tag. Also, since a blog can have many tags, they are not listed like categories. Instead, to find an existing tag start typing the name and it will appearafter that you should Press Add button. Alternatively, if the tag you’re looking for is among the ones you use most, you can search under it. Choose one of the most used tags.

How to Display Categories and Tags in WordPress Widget Areas

The most common place to display your blog categories and tags is in the sidebar area, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only place. Using widgets, you can display categories and tags in any widget area you choose.

From your Control Panel, navigate to: Appearance > Widgets.

Here are the tools you’ll need to view taxonomies: categories and Tag Cloud widgets.

Drag and drop widgets into the widget area you want, add a title, set any additional options you want and click save.

How to Create Custom Taxonomies

We said earlier that categories and tags are the default taxonomies that come with every WordPress installation. But we also mentioned you can create your own custom taxonomies. Let’s take a look at how you can add your own taxonomies to your WordPress website.

Basically, you can create any taxonomy you want. The important thing is that it fits your blog content and context. You can sort articles by author, for example by genre if you’re publishing about fiction.

Your custom taxonomies can be configured as categories (with hierarchy) or simple tags. This is your choice.

There are two ways to create a custom classification:

Today, we will show you an easier way through the plugin.

There are several plugins on the market that allow users to easily create custom taxonomies. Custom Post Type UI It is a plugin that, in addition to taxonomies, allows you to create custom post types for your blog.

After installing the plugin you will see a new option in your admin menu: CPT user interface. Click on it and then Add/Edit Taxonomy.

Now fill in the required fields by specifying the classification information, plural and singular tags and set the type of post to which the classification will be added.

Then continue Settings below and pay particular attention hierarchyI field: if you set it to WRONG, your taxonomy will be a tag (since tags cannot be hierarchical). So, if you want to create a category, set this option to: True.

After you save your settings, your newly created custom taxonomy will appear in the post editor like this:

final thoughts

Taxonomies in WordPress are among the most useful functions of the platform, and better yet, they are easy to implement. Their contribution to the overall user experience and indirectly to the popularity and ranking of your website is remarkable. So if you’re avoiding using categories and tags to sort your content, you’d better change that right away. Fortunately, you now know why you should use taxonomies and how best to do it.