Display and Style WordPress Tag Cloud Widget with Categories Too

WordPress comes with two widgets for displaying your tags and categories. Depending on the number of blog post tags and categories, you can use these widgets as they are. But you can also style your list of tags or categories, so they are more useable by your readers. This tutorial shows you how to display and style WordPress Tag Cloud widget to add buttons for both post tags and categories.

This is how the Categories widget displays the list of categories. In the Genesis Sample theme, it underlines the links and adds a line between. This is a great option if you have only a few categories, but that list can get quite long and take up your entire sidebar. Another choice for the Categories widget, if you have lots of categories, is to hide them behind a select drop down, but then it’s not as easy for reader to see them.

There is another option; you can use the WordPress Tag Cloud widget instead. By default the tag cloud widget will show either tags or categories, and display the links at different font sizes depending on the number of posts using that tag or category. While this is great if you want to highlight your most popular categories, some of the lesser used categories or tags will be really tiny and difficult to read.

So let’s see what we can do.

Add the Tag Cloud Widget

• Under Appearance > Widgets or Appearance > Customize, drag the Tag Cloud widget to your sidebar.
• Give the widget a Title
• Under the drop down, choose either Categories or Tags.

I’m choosing Tags for this example, but I often use Categories. If you have custom taxonomy, such as e-commerce (Woocommerce, iThemes Exchange) product categories, you can choose them too.

Style WordPress Tag Cloud Widget

You can add styles to your Custom CSS editor or you can edit your child theme style.css.

• The first thing you want to do to give a button look to your tags and categories is to add display: inline-block;
• Next you can make the links all the same font size; you will also need to add an !important declaration. Use font-size: 16px !important;
• Then you can remove the link underline. text-decoration: none;
• Then add a background color, so it starts to look like a button. background-color: #ddd;
• The buttons are a bit small, so you can add some extra padding. padding: 2px 5px;
• And last, add some margin between the buttons. margin: 0 5px 5px 0;

Add Some More Styles

• You could also change the link color, especially if your link color doesn’t go with your button color. color: #000;
• If you want your buttons to have rounded corners, add border-radius: 3px;
• You can also give the tag and category buttons different colors on hover. color: #c3251d; and/or background-color: #999;

The CSS to Add to Your style.css

This CSS is for the right side of the first image.

.widget_tag_cloud .tagcloud a {
	background-color: #ddd;
	border-radius: 3px;
	color: #000;
	display: inline-block;
	font-size: 16px !important;
	margin: 0 5px 5px 0;
	padding: 2px 5px;
	text-decoration: none;
}

.widget_tag_cloud .tagcloud a:hover {
	background-color: #999;
	color: #c3251d;
}

Another Option for Genesis Sample Theme

This CSS is the left side of the first image.

.widget_tag_cloud .tagcloud a {
	background-color: #999;
	color: #c3251d;
	display: inline-block;
	font-size: 16px !important;
	margin: 0 5px 5px 0;
	padding: 2px 5px;
	text-decoration: none;
}

.widget_tag_cloud .tagcloud a:hover {
	background-color: #ddd;
	color: #000;
}

This a simple method to style WordPress tag cloud widget with your tags and categories to allow readers to choose them easily. It’s a good option for e-commerce product categories. You can add a comment with your CSS for your categories.