Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at WPCat2Tag Importer.

If you’ve ever worked with a WordPress site that’s been around for a while, you’ve probably run into a situation where the taxonomy — that’s the way content is organised using categories and tags — has gotten a bit messy over time. Maybe categories were set up in a hurry early on, or the site’s content strategy changed, and now what used to be organised as categories would make more sense as tags, or the other way around. That’s exactly the problem WPCat2Tag Importer is designed to solve.

At its core, WPCat2Tag Importer is a WordPress plugin that migrates content between two of WordPress’s built-in taxonomy types: categories and tags. You can go either direction — converting categories into tags, or converting tags back into categories. This gives you real flexibility when you’re restructuring how your site’s content is labelled and discovered.

Let’s walk through what the plugin actually does, and why each feature matters.

The first thing to know is that it supports bulk migration. Rather than going post by post and manually reassigning taxonomy terms, you can run the conversion across your entire content library in one operation. If you’ve got hundreds or thousands of posts, that’s a massive time saver.

Next up is hierarchy handling. WordPress categories support parent-child relationships — so you might have a category called Technology with subcategories like Hardware and Software underneath it. Tags, on the other hand, are flat — they don’t have a hierarchy. WPCat2Tag Importer gives you the option to flatten that hierarchy when you convert. So if you’re moving categories to tags, it can take those nested structures and bring everything up to the same level. That’s worth thinking through carefully before you run the migration, because once you flatten, those parent-child relationships are gone.

One of the most important features — and this is good practice for any bulk operation — is the preview step. Before the plugin actually makes any changes, you can run a preview to see exactly what’s going to happen. Which categories are going to become tags, how many posts will be affected, what the end result will look like. You review that first, and only then do you execute. This is what the documentation calls safe operation, and it’s genuinely useful for catching anything unexpected before it becomes a real problem.

After migration, you’ve also got the option to set up URL redirects. This matters because when categories become tags, the URLs change. A URL that used to point to a category archive page will no longer work unless you redirect it. The plugin can handle that automatically, which helps you avoid broken links and keeps your search engine rankings intact.

Finally, you get a detailed log report after the migration runs. This gives you a record of everything that changed — useful both for troubleshooting and for documenting what was done, especially if you’re working as part of a team.

Now, where does NZRT actually use this? There are a few specific scenarios called out in the wiki. One is converting category-based module organisation into tags. If content was originally bucketed into categories to represent modules or sections, and the site’s architecture has evolved to where tags are a better fit, this plugin handles that shift cleanly.

Another use case is migrating a legacy category structure. Older WordPress sites often accumulate categories over time without a clear plan, and WPCat2Tag Importer gives you a way to clean that up as part of a broader content reorganisation.

The third scenario is consolidating taxonomy after content reorganisation. If you’ve just gone through a significant restructure — merging content, removing sections, rebranding — the taxonomy often needs to catch up, and this plugin is the tool for that job.

If you want to dig deeper, the wiki points you to three related notes. There’s one on Post Types and Taxonomies, which gives you the broader WordPress content model context. There’s a Plugins Overview, which is the master list of plugins in use across the site. And there’s a note on JC Importer, which handles a different kind of import workflow if you need to bring content in from external sources rather than reorganise what’s already there.

So to sum up: WPCat2Tag Importer is a focused, flexible, and safe tool for reorganising WordPress taxonomy. Preview first, think through your hierarchy options, make sure redirects are enabled if your URLs matter, and always review the log once it’s done.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.