◦ Comprehensive security
◦ 24/7 support
WordPress Guide → Post →Tag
What is a WordPress tag? A practical guide for site owners
A WordPress tag is a label you attach to a blog post to mark it as being about a specific topic. Tags help you organize your content.
Tags often get confused with categories, which are the other built-in way to organize WordPress posts. They look similar in the dashboard, behave similarly, and do overlap in purpose, but they’re not the same thing.
So, to clear things up, here’s what we’ll cover in this guide:
- What a WordPress tag actually is.
- How tags differ from categories.
- How to add, edit, and delete tags in the WordPress dashboard.
- How tags affect your SEO.
- Best practices for using tags effectively.
Get fast, reliable hosting for WordPress
Power your site with the industry’s fastest, most optimized WordPress hosting
What is a WordPress tag?
A WordPress tag is a piece of metadata you assign to a post to describe what the post is specifically about. Tags are usually short (one to three words), and you can assign multiple tags to a single post.
When a visitor clicks a tag on your site, they’re taken to an automatically generated archive page that lists every post you’ve tagged with that same word.
WordPress uses something called a ‘taxonomy’ to organize content. A taxonomy is just a fancy word for a system that groups things together. Tags and categories are both taxonomies, and they’re the two that come built into WordPress by default. The difference is in how they work.
Here are some examples:
- A food blog might use categories like ‘Breakfast’, ‘Lunch’, ‘Dinner’, and ‘Desserts’, then use tags like ‘banana bread’, ‘gluten-free’, ‘one-pot’, or ‘vegan’ to provide specific details for each recipe.
- A travel blog might use categories like ‘Europe’, ‘Asia’, ‘North America’, and tags for specific countries, cities, or activities mentioned in each post.
- A WordPress tutorial blog might use categories like ‘Themes’, ‘WordPress Plugins’, ‘Performance’, ‘Security’, and tags like ‘Kadence’, ‘WooCommerce’, ‘caching’, or ‘SSL’ to target specific tools and topics.
The general rule is that categories give your site its overall structure, while tags add a layer of specificity underneath.
Categories vs. tags: what’s the difference?
WordPress tags and WordPress categories are both taxonomies, but they behave differently in several important ways.
| Feature | Tags | Categories |
|---|---|---|
| Required on posts? | No | Yes (WordPress assigns ‘Uncategorized’ if you don’t pick one) |
| Hierarchical? | No | Yes (parent/child relationships supported) |
| Use case | Specific topics within a post | Broad subject groupings |
| Number per post | Often many (5-10 is common) | Usually one or two |
| Typical examples | ‘banana bread’, ‘beginner-friendly’, ‘one-pot’ | ‘Recipes’, ‘Travel’, ‘WordPress Tutorials’ |
| Default URL slug | yoursite.com/tag/example/ | yoursite.com/category/example/ |
| Appears in navigation menus? | Sometimes (via tag widgets) | Often (categories are commonly used as menu items) |
The most important practical difference is that tags are flat and categories are hierarchical. You can nest categories inside other categories (a parent category ‘Desserts’ with child subcategories like ‘Cakes’ and ‘Cookies’), but tags don’t work this way. Every tag is its own standalone label.
The second difference is that categories are designed to be the main organizational backbone of your blog, while tags add detail. A typical WordPress blog has somewhere between 5 and 20 categories. The number of tags can run into the hundreds without being a problem, as long as you’re using them consistently.
For more detail on how taxonomies work overall, see our WordPress Taxonomies: The Ultimate Guide.
How to add a tag in WordPress
Adding tags to WordPress posts is straightforward and can be done in two places: directly inside the post editor or through the dedicated Tags screen.
Adding WordPress tags while writing a post
This is the most common method and the one most people use day-to-day:
- Open the post you’re editing in your WordPress dashboard, or create a new one.
- Look in the right-hand sidebar of the block editor/site editor. You should see a panel labeled Tags (it might be collapsed by default).
- Click the panel to expand it.
- Start typing the tag you want to add. WordPress will suggest existing tags as you type if you’ve used them before.
- Press Enter or comma to add the tag. The tag will appear as a chip below the input field.
- Repeat for each additional tag.
- Save or update the post when you’re done.
That’s it. The tags are now attached to the post and will appear on the published version.
Adding tags through the Tags screen
The Tags screen is useful for setting up tags in advance, editing existing tags, or adding longer descriptions to your tags.
- From your WordPress dashboard, go to Posts > Tags in the left sidebar.
- You’ll see a form on the left for adding a new tag and a table on the right listing all existing tags.
- Fill in the Name field. This is the public-facing name of the tag.
- Optionally, fill in the Slug field. This is the URL-friendly version of the name (lowercase, hyphens instead of spaces). If you leave it blank, WordPress generates a slug from the name automatically.
- Optionally, fill in the Description field. This is the description that will appear on the tag’s archive page, which can be useful for SEO and for giving readers context about the tag.
- Click Add New Tag.
The tag is now available to use on any post.
How to edit or delete WordPress tags
Tags can be edited or deleted at any time from the Tags screen.
How to edit or delete tags
Editing a tag’s name will update it on every post that uses the tag. Editing the slug will change the URL of the tag’s archive page (which can be useful for SEO cleanup, but be careful, since old URLs will 404 unless you set up a redirect).
- Go to Posts > Tags in your WordPress dashboard.
- Find the tag you want to edit in the table on the right.
- Hover over the tag name to reveal options. Click Edit.
- Update the name, slug, or description as needed.
- Click Update.
How to delete a tag in WordPress
Deleting a tag removes it from every post that was tagged with it. The posts themselves are unaffected, but they’ll no longer be associated with the tag, and the tag’s archive page will be removed.
If you delete a tag that had a unique URL with backlinks pointing to it, set up a redirect to a relevant page to preserve any SEO value.
- Go to Posts > Tags.
- Find the tag you want to delete.
- Hover over the tag name and click Delete.
- Confirm the deletion.
You can also delete tags in bulk by selecting multiple tags using the checkboxes and choosing Delete from the bulk actions dropdown.
How WordPress tags appear on your site
Once you’ve added a tag to a post, here’s what happens on the public-facing side of your site.
Tag links on individual posts
Most WordPress themes display the tags assigned to a post somewhere on the post itself, usually at the bottom of the content or in the post’s metadata block (alongside the publish date and author). Each tag is a clickable link.
Tag archive pages
Every tag automatically generates an archive page that lists all posts using that tag. The URL follows the pattern yoursite.com/tag/your-tag-name/. This page is generated by WordPress on the fly and updates automatically as you add or remove the tag from posts.
The archive page typically shows the post excerpt for each tagged post, along with the title, publish date, and featured image. Some themes display tag descriptions at the top of the archive page, which is one reason to fill in the Description field when you create a tag.
Tag clouds and tag widgets
WordPress used to make heavy use of ‘tag cloud’ widgets, which display all your tags at once, with popular tags shown in larger text. These have largely fallen out of fashion since the block editor era, and most modern themes don’t include them by default. If you want one, the block editor still supports a Tag Cloud block you can add to widgets, sidebars, or pages. Whether you should use one comes down to your site’s design and whether the visual element fits.
How tags affect SEO
Tags affect search engine optimization in a few ways, but the relationship between tags and SEO is more nuanced than it looks at first.
What tags do well for SEO
Tags help search engines understand the topical focus of your content. They also create automatic internal linking through tag archive pages, which can help search engines crawl your site and discover related content. A consistent tagging strategy can support topic cluster SEO approaches, in which related pieces of content are grouped to demonstrate authority in a subject area.
Where tags can hurt SEO
The most common SEO problem with tags is creating thin content on tag archive pages. If you create a tag and only use it on one or two posts, the resulting tag archive page contains very little unique content. Google can flag these pages as low-quality, which can hurt your overall site rankings.
Another common issue is creating tags that are nearly identical to existing categories or to each other. If you have a category called ‘Recipes’ and also a tag called ‘Recipes’, search engines might struggle to decide which page should rank, and you can end up competing with yourself for the same keyword. The same problem can happen with singular and plural versions of the same word (‘Recipe’ as a tag and ‘Recipes’ as a category).
Current SEO best practice for tag pages
For sites that don’t use many tags or use them inconsistently, many SEO practitioners now recommend noindex tag archive pages. This tells search engines not to include the tag pages themselves in search results, which prevents thin-content issues while still letting tags do their job of organizing content for visitors.
SEO plugins like Yoast SEO plugin and Rank Math both offer settings to noindex tag pages with a single toggle. If you decide to keep tag pages indexed, focus on building up tag descriptions and using each tag on enough posts (5+ is a reasonable benchmark) that the archive page has substantial content.
Getting started with WordPress tags
WordPress tags are a small feature that adds up over time. Used consistently, they make your content easier for readers to navigate and for search engines to understand. Used carelessly, they create a mess of one-off labels that don’t help anyone.
The fundamentals are simple: pick a consistent vocabulary, use tags for specific topics rather than broad subjects, reuse tags across multiple posts, and clean up periodically. Combined with a good category structure underneath, tags can be one of the more useful tools in WordPress for keeping a growing site organized.
For more on how WordPress organizes content, see our guides on WordPress page vs post and WordPress taxonomies. And if you’re ready to build out a WordPress site that handles the content load you’re planning, Liquid Web’s managed WordPress hosting gives you the infrastructure to focus on the content rather than the servers.
Additional resources
What is WordPress? →
A complete beginner’s guide to WordPress.org
What’s the difference between tags and categories in WordPress? →
Learn the key differences between WordPress tags and categories to better organize your website content.
Beginner’s Guide to WordPress themes →
Learn how they work, what to look for, how to choose, and more
Aaron Binders works as a Linux Support Technician at Liquid Web and focuses on resolving server-side customer issues. When not spending time with his family, he has a passion for sports such as football and boxing, as well as reading the latest ICT magazines.