Find The Most Used Tags On Your WordPress Site
For many years, WordPress has offered a feature that quickly added commonly used tags to your posts.
This feature was really helpful for users to write a lot of content. Here are some examples from real WordPress users:
- “I use the “most used” tags feature all the time on my photo blog where I tag posts with the location and content of my photos. I often have the same general location and similar content so the tag cloud is invaluable.”
- “Remembering terms isn't very user friendly. Having some sort of method to select from an existing list helps.”
- “I don't always use tags – but when I do, I like to be consistent.”
- “It's hard to think of what common topics are touched on in the article we're uploading – a display of common ones we have already used would help.”
In this blog post, I'm going to introduce you to the basic “Most Used Tags” feature, and I'll also show you how to create a more advanced version with the TaxoPress plugin.
Table of Contents
Most Used Tags Feature in the WordPress Core
In the old Classic Editor, this screenshot below shows the “Most Used Tags” feature. You can browse the most commonly used tags and click to add them to your post. The most popular tags are in the largest font size.
This feature was missing from the first few releases of the Gutenberg editor. However, it was restored in WordPress 5.8, because so many users wanted it back. You can now use the “Tags” box in the sidebar to show the 10 most used tags. In the new version, there are only 10 tags and they all use the same size font.
Most Used Tags Feature in TaxoPress
If you want more flexibility than the core “Most Used Tags” feature, then take a look at the TaxoPress plugin. This screenshot below shows the “Suggest Terms” feature. This is similar to the “Most Used Tags” feature, but with several big advantages:
- Search: You can use this to find any specific terms.
- Taxonomy: You can search Categories, or any other taxonomy.
- Method for choosing terms: You can organize the terms by popularity, but also alphabetically.
- Maximum terms: You can decide how many terms to show. It doesn't have to be limited to only 10.
This article explains the Suggest Terms feature in detail. There's also a video available to help:
If you don't want so many tags, there are solutions. You can move some tags to a new taxonomy. You can delete unused terms. There are lot of tools available in TaxoPress to help you manage WordPress Tags and Categories.