WordPress is not Instagram. Nobody is going to be disagreeing with me on that, right? We all understand that WordPress is different from Instagram. Yet, many people treat WordPress tags the same way they use hashtags on Instagram. That behavior might feel harmless, but it is costing you badly. Not in likes or followers, but in something far more critical to your site’s performance: crawl budget and SEO performance.

WordPress is not Instagram

A hashtag on Instagram, such as #businessowner or #SEO, is beneficial for your Instagram post’s visibility and findability. If you add a popular hashtag to your photo, people searching on that hashtag could find your post. More hashtags? More reach. 

But WordPress doesn’t work that way. Adding tags to a post leads to creating tag archive pages for all these tags. WordPress does that automatically for you. Thank you so much, WordPress :-). If you tag every blog post with 10 or more unique tags, you’re not increasing visibility. Instead, you’re generating many empty tag pages that search engines will crawl. 

And here’s the catch: each of these tag pages eats up crawl budget. Search engines like Google spend time crawling these empty pages. That way, you are wasting crawl budget that could have been used for high-value pages. The result? Lower site visibility, slower indexing, and poorer SEO performance

Why do we add so many tags?

Are you also guilty of adding those tags to your posts in WordPress? Don’t feel bad. Everybody seems to do it. The question is, why do we add so many tags?

I think Instagram is partly to blame. We got used to using hashtags in a certain way because of Instagram. Our brains got wired so that adding a lot of (hash)tags is linked to it being beneficial to the visibility of your posts. We started adding those tags to our WordPress posts without giving it too much thought.

Another reason for our blown-out-of-proportion love of tags is probably because WordPress encourages users to add tags, too. Before you publish a post, WordPress will nudge you to add a tag. That nudge will make people think adding some tags is a good idea. 

Why is adding tags in WordPress a bad thing?

In WordPress, tags are meant to add structure to your blog post. If you have many blog posts, it can be challenging for visitors and Google to find their way around your website. Tags are designed to help structure your site in such a way that visitors and Google can find the content they want to read. 

But what happens if you use too many tags? If you have more tags than posts, your taxonomy will be overloaded. An overloaded taxonomy will result in thin content or empty archive pages. Empty or near-empty tag pages will hurt your SEO and waste your crawl budget.

So what now?

WordPress is not Instagram, and tags are not hashtags. If you’re using too many tags on your site, you’re wasting your crawl budget. Luckily, we have a solution! Ravi recommends installing Fewer Tags. Fewer Tags can help you manage your tags and keep your site well-structured and organized. 

Hashtags might help you get noticed on Instagram. But in WordPress, it works the other way around. Using Fewer Tags helps the right pages get seen and ranked. It improves your SEO and brings more relevant traffic to your site.