July 10, 2024

Fewer Tags Free Plugin

This plugin minimizes the effect of having too many tags by setting a minimum number of posts needed for a tag to be “live” on your site.

One of the most common SEO problems on WordPress sites is that people add too many tags to posts. In fact, our research shows that most WordPress sites use tags wrong. The WordPress interface makes it incredibly easy to do so, and with every tag you add, you add another URL to your site for search engines to crawl and index. This plugin minimizes that effect by setting a minimum number of posts needed for a tag to be “live” on your site.

Fewer Tags Free solves this problem for you! It does that by simply not showing tags that have less than 10 posts in them to users and search engines.

Tags that have less than the configured number of posts:

Are hidden from visitors and search engines on your site, and are redirected to your homepage.
They don’t show up in tag listings.
The are no longer linked in WordPress core’s or Yoast SEO or Slim SEO generated XML sitemaps.

This positively affects your site’s SEO and also leads to less crawling, as you have less useless tag pages.

See this video if you want to learn how to use Fewer Tags Free.

If you want to truly solve the tag problem on your site, consider the Fewer Tags Pro plugin & course. It’ll help you fix the problems with tags on your site very quickly.

You can buy Fewer Tags Pro (or read more about it) on fewertags.com!

Installation

Search for Fewer Tags on the repository.
Install the plugin.
Optionally: go to Settings Reading and adjust the default minimum number of posts (the default is 10).
You’re done.

Screenshots

The Fewer Tags settings on the Settings → Reading screen.
Fewer Tags adds a column to the Tags overview page, showing which tags are live and which aren't.
Search engines agree with us, this is Fabrice Canel, Head of Bing, on LinkedIn.

FAQ

Can I safely install this on an existing site?

So you have a site with a lot of tags that don’t add any value? Yes, you can safely add this plugin. It will redirect the useless tag pages to your site’s homepage.

Should I also noindex my tag pages?

No, you should not noindex your tag pages. If your tag pages have more than 10 posts in them, they are valuable ways of getting your site crawled and of combining related content. There’s no reason to noindex those pages at that point. What you could (and should) do is add descriptions to those tag pages.

How can I report security bugs?

You can report security bugs through the Patchstack Vulnerability Disclosure Program. The Patchstack team help validate, triage and handle any security vulnerabilities. Report a security vulnerability.

Can you help me get rid of those tags entirely?

Yes, that’s why we created Fewer Tags Pro!

Changelog

1.5.1

Fixes a case where the keywords output in the Yoast SEO schema might be of the wrong type.

1.5

Enhancements:

Add support for Slim SEO, props Anh Tran.

Bugfixes:

Reinstates the “View” action for other taxonomies than tags.

Development:

Updated PHPCompatibility, added PHPStan and fixed all resulting issues.

1.4.1

Trigger rebuild because we broke the WordPress.org plugin build system.

1.4

Changed the option name from joost_min_posts_count to fewer_tags so it’s more recognizable for people.
Added uninstall functionality that removes the setting from the database on uninstall of the plugin.
Simplified the autoloader, no longer requiring composer packages.
Added videos for Fewer Tags Free and Fewer Tags Pro to the readme.txt.

1.3.3

Minor stability fixes.

1.3.2

Fix fatal error caused by not loading the autoload file.

1.3

Make sure the output of the Gutenberg terms block is filtered to when it’s showing tags.
Some minor optimizations to how the plugin is loaded to speed it up.

1.2

First release on WordPress.org.

1.1

Minor header and sanitization improvements.

1.0

Initial release on GitHub.