WordPress: The Difference Between Tags And Categories

WordPress offers two different ways to organize any Posts i.e. Categories and Tags whereas the technical names for all these are taxonomies.

Both Categories and Tags are more generic terms in WordPress that you can fill in with specific information for your website.

There isn’t much of a difference at all.

Let’s see the difference between Tags And Categories.

In WordPress, Categories allowed for a broad grouping of any post topics, but when you describe a post in more details, more categories are required and that led to very long category lists inside the blog and very long lists in Categories Widgets.

So there have tags, too.

Tags are similar to categories. But they are generally used to describe your post in more specific.

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But what’s the difference between Categories and Tags?

Categories are hierarchical that means these can have a relationship to each other, like parent and child.
For e.g. under the category “Asia” there could have categories called “Viet Nam” and “Thailand”.
Tags are NOT hierarchical that means there’s no relationship between them.

Let’s see below picture:

Category allows us to do some SEO tricks with the URL.
For e.g. the URL of the “Thailand” Category could be /category/asia/thailand/ whereas the URL of the Laos Tag will be /tag/thailand/

A good category structure is flexible which is designed to handle any content that you’ll publish in the future.
When visitors want a way to explore any content specifically that doesn’t fit within your existing categories, it’s time to start adding tags.

If you take a time to create and maintain a limited set of highly relevant categories and tags in your WordPress blog, you can see benefits in time.