Combine existing categories

  • dot12b · Member ·

    I’ve been blogging for a while, but have realised I’ve created far to many categories and tags over time, so I’m trying to rationalise them now.

    I can see how I use the Category and Tag manager pages to rename or delete existing categories and tags, and use the Category to Tag converter to change some existing categories to tag.

    This is all great so far – I’ve found there’s a number of categories with similar names that I’d want to combine into the one, and this is where I have a problem, or question for you – Is there a way I can easily combine existing categories into one without having to go through and manually updating every blog post with the category I’m wanting to combine into another one, as in some instances there are hundreds of blog posts.

    e.g. Say I have a category called Travel and another called Holidays, but I want to combine the two categories into the one category called Travel. i.e. I want all blog posts that currently have the category Travel or Holidays, to end up with only the category Travel.

    Any suggestions would be most welcome, as I really need to tidy up my categories and tags to help my site be more findable in searches.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • staff-mckluskey · Staff ·

    Hi there!

    There isn’t really a way to automatically merge categories, however, there is a quicker way than to open up and edit each post one by one.

    If you go to your site’s WP admin, you’ll see that you can filter all the posts by categories. After you’ve chosen the category you want to edit, you can hover over each post and click on “Quick edit”. There you’ll be able to change the category and update :)

    I’ve prepared you a short video to explain that better: https://d.pr/i/NMRVY0

    I hope that helps :)

    Also, remember that with your Premium plan you can access live chat directly from https://wordpress.com/help/contact

  • dot12b · Member ·

    Thank you for your help, that’ll make my manual job a bit easier, so thank you.
    Thanks also for reminding me that I can use live chat to get support.

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