How To Merge Categories in WordPress

The simplest way to merge categories in WordPress is to use either the Term Management Tools plugin or the Bulk Move plugin. That is if you don’t want to merge two or more categories on your WordPress blog by dabbling in code.

In this post, I’m going to teach you a simple lesson on how to easily merge categories in WordPress.

But before that, we want to know why or when it may become necessary for a blogger to consider combining a number of categories they have already created.

Personally, I merge categories in WordPress for the following reasons.

To Reduce the Number of Categories

There comes a time when I realize that I have too many categories on my blog. A very large number of categories can make life difficult for you when you have to find time to attend to each and every one of them.

And who wants to spend so much time managing categories when there are other blogging tasks asking for urgent attention? So, for easy management, I sometimes take a hard look at the number of my categories and select those that I can merge into one.

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To Avoid Duplication

Moreover, we bloggers often fall into the temptation of creating duplicate categories without knowing. When you observe that some of your WordPress categories are just a carbon copy of each other, then maybe it is time for you to merge them.

Don’t forget, duplicate content is not good for your blog’s SEO.

To Bring Together Low Content Categories

I have a blog where one of the categories contains over 300 blog posts. The other categories on this same website are struggling to catch up with this category in terms of numbers.

For instance, there are categories that have just about 25 blog posts. Recently, there was a category with as few as 4 articles.

Now, this is the kind of scenario that you need to avoid as much as possible. Personally, I think that the gaps are too wide. So what did I do? I merged some of the low-content categories.

There may be other reasons to merge categories in WordPress. What is important is that you need to learn how to combine categories in WordPress without much sweat. So this is what I’m about to show you.

Are you ready to learn how to move categories on your WordPress blog? Then come with me.

Install and Activate the Term Management Tools Plugin

The Term Management Tools plugin is what I personally use to merge categories in WordPress. Here are the simple steps to follow to merge any number of WordPress categories.

• Go to your WordPress Admin dashboard.
• Look for ‘Plugins’ in the dashboard menu, hover on it and click ‘Add New’.
• In the WordPress plugins window that will appear, type ‘Term Management Tools’ in the search box.
• Click the ‘Install’ button when the ‘Term Management Tools’ plugin image appears. See the sample image above.
• As soon as installing is over, click the ‘Activate’ button to activate it on your WordPress website.

You will now see your Term Management Tools plugin installed on your blog. The next step is to begin working with the plugin.

Here is what you need to do to see this plugin in action.

• Go back to your WordPress Admin dashboard and look for ‘Posts’
• Hover on the ‘posts’ button and you will see ‘Categories’.
• Click ‘Categories’ to view all your categories including those that you intend to merge.
• Tick the tiny box on the left side of each category name you want to merge.

Remember this. If you already have the particular category that you wish to maintain and merge the others with, you must tick its tiny box too.

On the other hand, where you need to create a new category to contain all the merged categories, follow the steps for creating new categories in WordPress. Then continue with the steps here.

• Next, go to the ‘Bulk Actions’ section up there on the same page. Click and select ‘Merge’ in the dropdown list that will appear.
• You will see these boxes appear: ‘Merge’, ‘Into’, ‘Apply’.
• Inside the field next to ‘Into’, type the name of the category you wish to maintain to contain the others.
• Click ‘Apply’.

That’s it. You have just finished combining categories in WordPress. Wait for a few seconds to see your actions take effect.

Bulk Move WordPress Plugin

An alternative to the Term Management Tools plugin is the Bulk Move plugin. You can choose to install and activate the Bulk Move plugin for moving categories and tags on your WordPress blog.

So this provides you with a different way to merge categories in WordPress.

All you need to do is to activate the Bulk Move plugin on your website.

After that, you will see clear instructions to follow when you hover on the ‘Tools’ icon on your WordPress Admin dashboard.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, a few simple clicks are enough for you to merge categories in WordPress. And there are good reasons why you and I may decide to merge our blog categories. I wish you happy blogging.