Converting WordPress categories into tags
We looked before at the difference between WordPress categories and tags, but what do you do if you have a million different categories that really should be tags? Fortunately, WP has a built-in tool which allows you to easily convert categories into tags: find it in Admin > Posts > Categories, linked down at the bottom on the right.
It's slightly mis-named, as it doesn't actually *convert* categories into tags, but duplicates category names as tag names for the categories you select. If you then want to rationalise your categories, they'll need to be edited separately.
So for example, if you have "red", "blue" and "yellow" as categories, you want them to be tags, and all the posts in them to be in a category called "green":
- use the convertor to turn "red", "blue" and "yellow" into tags,
- create the "green" category if it doesn't already exist,
- use Edit Posts to move posts from the "red", "blue" and "yellow" categories into the "green" category,
- then delete the "red", "blue" and "yellow" categories.
Posted by Sue on May 23, 2009 in WordPress.
Hi. Just a quick note to say thanks for this post, it helped me. I didn't realize was a built-in tool to do this.
You made my day!!! Thanks a lot!
I did remember there was something like this, but could not find it again and then I tried to find a plugin (which of course I did not find in the end) and then got here
Happy you wrote this post.
PS: What would help even more: a screen shot if you have the time.
Thanks for the tip. Have just been importing from Blogger and all the tags came across as categories.
Hi Nick, glad it was useful
The Blogger import always works like that - I think that gets me more hits on this post than anything else!
Thanks so much for this post. After considering my blog and it's focus I recently wanted to convert one of my categories into a tag and then convert one of my tags into a category. Assumed I would need a plug in for that - but thanks to your post it's super easy! Didn't realize you can actually do Tags to Categories using this same method as well. Once you click the "category to tag converter" link there are two buttons at the top to go in either direction!
You saved me tons of time - thanks!