What are WordPress Tag Archive Pages?
WordPress uses Tags, Categories and other taxonomies to organize your content.
Some of these are private taxonomies and will only show in the admin area of your site. However, all the Tags, Categories or taxonomy terms that are available on the front of your site. These terms can be displayed on the posts they’re assigned to. The terms can also have their own pages and these are known as “Archive Pages” in WordPress.
Let’s see an example of how archive pages work. In this screenshot below, the WordPress post has four tags. Click on any of those links and you’ll be take to the archive page for that term.
In this next screenshot, I’ve clicked on “Orange”. The tag archive page is now showing me all the posts that are associated with the “Orange” tag. By default, these posts will only show posts. You can use the TaxoPress plugin to add Tags to Pages also. The posts on this page will probably be organized in a blog style with the most recent posts first, although some themes may offer a custom layout.
If you want to customize the appearance of tag archive pages, we have a guide for people using the new Site Editor. We also have a tutorial for template archives built using PHP.
The URL of these archive pages will normally follow a standard approach:
- Tags will use this URL format: /tag/orange/
- Categories will use this /category/food-ideas/
If you want to modify these URLs, I recommend our guide to taxonomy slugs. Here’s a specific guide to removing “Category” or “Tag” from your site’s URLs. Please note that there are restrictions on what characters are allows in slugs.
If you want to move away from using single pages to display the posts on a term, here are more ways to show all the posts attached to a term.
Although these appear to be normal WordPress pages, these archive pages won’t automatically appear inside search result. See how to show tag and category archive pages in WordPress search results.
It’s worth noting that these archive pages are only for individual terms. There is no single archive page that covers all your Category or Tag terms. All of those terms have their own specific pages.