Understanding How to Best Employ Taxonomies within WordPress – Speckyboy Design Magazine

For years, WordPress website owners have stressed over how to properly implementtaxonomies within the software; that’s because WordPress includes support for categories,custom fields, and tags, and all of these classification methods are both utilized and encouraged. Even more advanced WordPress users are not sure how to best employ these methods of tagging posts with relevant information, and they’ve largely stuck to categories as the primary way of filing new content into relevant containers.

While there’s certainly nothing wrong with using categories alone, it’s really not the most efficient or intuitive way to use taxonomies for post classification and containment. Instead, using custom fields and WordPress post tags presents a better way to separate content into smaller, more relevant niches.

In order to do this properly, however, it’s necessary to understand what the difference is between a category, a tag, and a custom field. Indeed, a view from above makes them look all rather similar. They all group and tag things, they all separate posts for viewing on the website, and they all must be relevant to a post’s content. While those things are true, there are issues of nuance that split these popular forms of taxonomy into completely different usage scenarios.