How to Merge Multiple Categories or Tags in WordPress

May 14th, 2017 | by Ravi Chahar || 2 Comments |

Most of the beginners create many categories and tags in their starting days with an urge to spread their words to a greater extent. But later on, they seek a guide to merge multiple categories or tags.

Yes, you read it right. You can merge many categories, subcategories, and tags to a single category. You can also merge those into a single tag.

When you merge two WordPress website into one, you need to merge multiple categories or tags because both the websites have different categories and you would publish the old content into an already existing category.

Why do People Merge Categories or Tags

It’s possible that you have created too many categories and now don’t have enough time to publish under all of these.

And if you’re trying to reduce and improve the navigation then it’s a great option to reduce the categories by merging. If you’re using tags and now many of those are outdated then you can merge those tags.

There are different ways of merging. Either you edit each and every post for which, you want to change the category or tags or you can use a WordPress plugin.

If you have many posts then the manual method can be brainstorming. So go with a WordPress plugin.

Start Merging and Bulk Editing Categories or Tags

Just install and activate Term Management Tools plugin. The best thing is you don’t need to do any kind of setting. It automatically adds extra features in the category section.

Go to Posts>>Categories and you will see the list of categories you have created so far.

Select all the categories you want to merge into a single category. Click on the “Bulk Actions” option and a drop-down menu will appear.

You can see many new options added by the plugin. For merging, click on the “merge” option.

Just after that, you see a new box to add the category in which you want to merge the selected categories. Fill the name and click on the “Apply” button.

You can merge the tags just like that. Go to Posts>>Tags and follow the same method.

Moving from One Taxonomy to Another ( Categories to Tags )

Using this plugin, you can also move your categories to tags or vice-versa. No extra efforts are required. Stay on the same page as you were before.

For categories, you just have to select the categories and select “Change taxonomy” option from the drop-down menu.

Choose the tags option from the second menu and click on the “Apply” button.

The similar process will be applicable for tags to category migration. Don’t forget to save the settings before leaving the page.

Set a Parent to Multiple Categories

Just like you do while creating and adding the WordPress categories and subcategories, you can also add a parent to multiple categories and tags.

Select the categories from the list and choose “Set parent” from the drop-down menu.

You will be asked to choose the parent category by showing an another drop-down menu. Select a parent category and click on the “Apply” button.

Save the settings and you have successfully created a parent category for multiple categories.

It’s always recommended to filter the categories and tags once in a while to organize your website. Many people just keeping adding new categories and forget the number of the categories available.

For such situation, it’s always good to merge multiple categories or tags. It will help you maintain your WordPress website properly.

Adding categories is also beneficial from the SEO point of view.

Though it’s the matter of choice, many people don’t use tags but categories but still, you should know about it. If you have any doubt, feel free to drop a comment.

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