Choose a Minimum and Maximum Number of Tags and Categories in WordPress

Tags and Categories are the two ways you can categorize your WordPress content.

There's often a debate about the right way to use Tags and Categories in order to optimize your sites for search engines.

Let's take a look at advice on how to use Tags and Categories …

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Video guide to numbers of Tags and Categories

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Expert advice for the number of Tags and Categories

This comment comes from Yoast, one of the leading SEO authorities in WordPress:

“We often see that a site’s category / tag structure is completely unmanaged. Even large news sites suffer from over-usage of tags and categories.”

Yoast is saying it's far more common to add too many tags and categories. This advice comes from Syed at WPBeginner:

“We say add no more than 10 tags to your posts unless you can justify it.”

This advice comes from Tom at ManageWP:

“A post should typically be in no more than one or two categories, and tagging should be limited only to the most relevant topics covered in the post.”

If you keep reading around the WordPress world, you'll see similar advice. There is definitely a maximum and a minimum number of tags that is optimal for your site's SEO.

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How to force the right number of tags and categories

If you have a lot of writers on your site, it can be hard to force your writers to follow SEO best practices.

The best way to set a maximum and minimum number of tags and categories is with the PublishPress Checklists plugin.

After installing the checklist, you'll see the Checklist settings. Notice the two options at the top:

• Number of categories
• Number of tags

You can set a maximum and minimum number for both of these options. The default choices are between 2 and 5 categories, and between 3 and 10 and tags.

When a writer goes to create a post, they'll see a “Checklist” box on the right sidebar. This will show them how many categories and tags they need to add.

Once you have added the correct number of tags, the red X will change to a green checkmark:

If you value your site's SEO, try PublishPress Checklists. It allows you to ensure all your content creators might your high-standards for SEO.

The plugin also allows you to set other restrictions on your content, including these:

• Maximum and minimum number of words
• Number of internal links to other posts
• Make sure a featured image is added
• Check for broken links.

Some other PublishPress plugins also have useful Tags and and Categories features. For example, you can stop users from creating new tags or restrict users to posting in one category.

With a little code you can also use author data to automatically create WordPress tags or automatically create WordPress Tags for user roles.

If you want some powerful tools to manage your Tags and Categories, check out the TaxoPress plugin.