Taxonomy Audit finds tag sprawl in Tags or any other flat, public taxonomy — orphan terms with no posts, terms used only once, and duplicate terms that differ only by case or whitespace. It reports the problems and fixes them: rename, delete, or merge. Every action ships free — nothing here is gated behind a paid tier.
Report sections
- Orphans — terms with zero posts attached. Deleting one removes no content associations, since nothing points to it.
- Single-use — terms attached to exactly one post. Listed for visibility — a high single-use count usually signals tags created once and never reused.
- Duplicate clusters — terms that normalize to the same string after lowercasing, trimming, and collapsing whitespace, so “SEO”, “seo”, and “SEO ” land in one cluster. The member with the highest post count becomes the canonical term.
Actions
- Rename — available on every term, not just orphans and duplicates. Click Rename, enter the new name, and it’s applied immediately.
- Delete — removes an orphan term outright. Only 0-count terms can be deleted this way.
- Merge — reassigns every post from a cluster’s non-canonical members onto the canonical term, then deletes the emptied members. A post that already carries the canonical term is left untouched rather than duplicated.
Every merge writes an entry to a merge log — the canonical term, the merged term’s name, and the affected post IDs — so it can be reversed by hand if needed.
Safety
Delete and merge both require an explicit confirmation before running, and the confirmation states exactly what will happen — how many posts move and where. Rename asks for the new name directly rather than a yes/no confirmation. Nothing is deleted, renamed, or reassigned without that step.
Running it
Content Ops → Taxonomy Audit. Choose a taxonomy, run the audit, and act on whatever the report finds. Re-running the audit after an action refreshes the report immediately.