How to Find The Most Popular Tags On Your WordPress Site
WordPress has a feature that allows you to quickly added commonly used tags to your posts.
This feature is really helpful for users who 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’ll show you how to find the most popular terms on your site. I’ll also show you more advanced options with the TaxoPress plugin.
Table of Contents
Video Guide to Most Used Tags
Option #1. Inside the Post Editor
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.
The TaxoPress plugin has a more powerful version of this feature. This screenshot below shows the “Show Existing Terms” feature, which can appear under the content you’re writing. This is part of the “TaxoPress AI” feature in TaxoPress. This is similar to the “Most Used Tags” feature, but with several big advantages:
- Taxonomies: You can look for popular Tags, Categories, or terms in any other taxonomy.
- Method for choosing terms: You can organize the terms by popularity, but also alphabetically and other criteria.
- Maximum terms: You can decide how many terms to show. It doesn’t have to be limited to only 10.
Option #2. The Terms Screens
You can also find an overview of popular tags by visiting a screen inside WordPress:
- Go to “Posts” and then “Tags” in your WordPress site.
- Click the “Count” column and you’ll see all your Tags organized according to how many posts they’re attached to.
If you want more flexibility than the core Tags features, then take a look at the TaxoPress plugin. This screenshot below shows the “Terms” screen in TaxoPress. You can sort and order all the terms on your site, no matter what taxonomy they are in. Click on the “Count” column header and you’ll see the terms ordered by popularity.
How to Remove Unpopular Tags
You may have noticed that you could use this feature to find terms that are not popular on your site. We also get questions about this from TaxoPress users. If you decide you don’t want so many tags, there are solutions. You can delete unused terms that aren’t attached to many posts. Also, you can remove terms from all posts. There are lot of tools available in TaxoPress to help you manage WordPress Tags and Categories.