How To: Display A WordPress Tag Cloud On Your Blog

By Kyle Eslick on April 7th, 2008 | Filed Under Hacks
Tag(s): WordPress Code, WordPress Hacks, WordPress How-To

Depending on how your WordPress blog is set up, you may have an interest in displaying your WordPress tags for your readers to dig through in a nice looking cloud format. This is something that is very nice for readers to see, as long as you are responsible with your tagging and don’t use an overwhelming number of tags.

In order to display tags on your WordPress blog, you’ll just want to add this little code snippet whenever you want the tag cloud to display (usually in the sidebar or footer somewhere depending on your blogs layout).

Here is the code you’ll need:

<?php wp_tag_cloud(''); ?>

WordPress also allows you to customize your cloud to display the way you want it to. Most people like to emphasize the most used tags by making their font much larger. You can determine the size using the following code:

<?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=8&largest=36&'); ?>

In this example, the tags will be displayed in alphabetical order with the least used tags being 8px and the most used tags will be 36px. You can of course adjust this to meet your needs.

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There Are 8 Responses So Far. »

1 Mac Tips
Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 5:25 am

Thats great just what I was looking for. Do you know by any chance how to get the tag cloud to display on a full seperate page and not in the sidebar?
2 Kyle Eslick
Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 5:53 am

@ Mac Tips - I would assume you could create a static page using your blog’s page.php file as a template and replace the page code with the tag cloud code. Then create a tag cloud page and select that template you created in the sidebar.

If that doesn’t make sense, I’ve got a post explaining how to do something similar going up sometime over the next week that should help.
3 Mac Tips
Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 6:11 am

Thanks Kyle i will take a look at it.
4 prefabrike
Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 6:53 am

Then create a tag cloud page and select that template you created in the sidebar.
5 David
Sunday, May 18th, 2008 at 10:58 pm

Thanks for this post, it was very helpful. I have been trying others’ brilliant ideas on how to get a tag cloud created for hours, your solution was very easy. Wish I’d have found it first…….
6 shahaan
Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 5:51 pm

Dear Kyle

@ Mac Tips - I would assume you could create a static page using your blog’s page.php file as a template and replace the page code with the tag cloud code. Then create a tag cloud page and select that template you created in the sidebar.

If that doesn’t make sense, I’ve got a post explaining how to do something similar going up sometime over the next week that should help.

Still waiting for your tutorial for static tag cloud page

Thanks in advance
7 Kyle Eslick
Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 6:15 pm

@ Shahaan - The post I was referencing can be found here!