🧹 Tidy up your tags: rename, translate, retire and delete
A new Tags page under Products lists every tag you have, so you can fix a name in each language, take one out of circulation, or delete the ones nothing uses.
When tags arrived, the only way to make one was to type it into the box on a product - and that was also the last word on it. A tag with a typo in it stayed that way. A tag you had finished with stayed in the list. And if your company works in more than one language, a tag only ever had the one name you first typed.
The new Tags page under Products is where all of that gets sorted out.
What is on the page
Every tag your company has, with three things beside each one:
- its short code, the permanent identifier a sales channel gets mapped to;
- how many products carry it - click the number and you land on the product list already filtered to that tag;
- how many of your languages it has been named in, so a half-translated catalogue is visible at a glance rather than something you find out about months later.
Use the language strip at the top to choose which language you are reading and writing. The page shows one at a time on purpose: at eight product languages, a column per language is a spreadsheet rather than a page.
Rename a tag, in each language
Open a tag, type its name for the language you are in, and save.
A rename reaches every product carrying the tag at once, which is the whole point of it - correcting "Clearnace" corrects it everywhere. It never moves the tag's code, so nothing that points at the tag is disturbed.
If a language has no name of its own, the field shows another language's name greyed out, as a hint rather than as a value, with a small tag saying which language it came from. Leave it blank and the tag goes on borrowing that name. Clear a name you had filled in and it goes back to borrowing.
Take a tag out of circulation
Archive a tag and it stops being offered when somebody tags a product, and drops out of the filter list. Products already carrying it keep it and go on showing it - archiving retires a label, it does not strip it off anything.
Press Show archived to see them again, and Unarchive to put one back.
Delete the ones nothing uses
A tag no product carries can be deleted outright. Where products do carry it, Delete is greyed out and says how many - archiving is what you want there.
Adding a tag here
The page has an Add a tag box, so a tag you know you want no longer has to be born on a product. Typing a name you already have attaches to that tag rather than making a second one, and the page tells you which tag it kept.
Worth knowing
The code never changes, and archiving does not free it. Archive clearance, create another tag called Clearance, and the new one gets clearance-2. Deleting a tag does release its code, which is the way out of one created with a name you did not want. There is deliberately no way to rename a code or to merge two tags.
Renaming a tag does not rename it in your shop yet. If the tag is on products you publish to WooCommerce, renaming it here marks those products to be sent again, but the shop keeps the label it already had. Correcting that is still on the list.
This page is for admins. Putting a tag on a product, the bulk Tag action on the product list and the tags column in the CSV are all unchanged and open to anyone who can edit products. It is only the shape of the list itself that is an admin job.