In one of my previous tutorials, I’ve shown you how to change the order of your WordPress posts and custom post types.

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In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to change the order of WordPress categories and taxonomy terms.

By default, WordPress arranges taxonomies in an alphabetical order.

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If you want to sort them in a custom way, you’ll have to use a plugin (unless you have web development skills).

Let’s get to it!

What are WordPress taxonomy terms

First, for those that might wonder, let me explain what “terms” stands for.

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While the taxonomy is the “Category” itself, “terms” are the items in it.

Example: Category (taxonomy) > Books (taxonomy term).

You can find out more info about taxonomies here.

Change the order of categories and taxonomy terms in WordPress

You can watch the video or read the tutorial.

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As I mentioned above, to change the order of your taxonomies, you’ll need a plugin called Category Order and Taxonomy Terms Order.

Step 1 – Install the plugin

Install and activate ‘Category Order and Taxonomy Terms Order’.

Here’s how to install a plugin in WordPress using different methods.

Step 2 – Check out the settings

After installing the plugin, you’ll find its settings by going to Settings > Taxonomies Terms Order in your WordPress Dashboard.

category order and taxonomy terms order plugin settings

As you can see, it only has 3 settings:

  1. Minimum Level to use this plugin – set the minimum WordPress user role allowed to change the order of the categories and taxonomy terms;
  2. Auto Sort:
    1. ON – the taxonomies will appear in the custom order that you chose;
    2. OFF – the taxonomies will appear in the original order;
  3. Admin Sort: ON/OFF – the above rules apply here as well.

Step 3 – Change the WordPress category and taxonomy terms order

Let’s use the default WordPress categories as an example.

Go to Posts > Taxonomy Order.

There, you’ll see all your categories, which you can simply reorder by dragging and dropping them.

That’s it!

The plugin also has an Advanced version which offers more features. It currently costs $35 (one-time, not recurring).

That’s a wrap

I hope you found the tutorial useful and comprehensive, and you managed to change the order of your categories and taxonomy terms in WordPress.

Don’t forget to share the post to help out others!

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