Last Updated on January 17, 2020 by Christopher G Mendla
Missing WordPress Categories and Tags Solution – Sept 2019 – I noticed that when editing posts on my sites that the categories and tags controls were missing. The problem was a conflict with the Autoptimize plugin. The resolution was fairly simple and involved only a slight performance hit.
Overview
One could work around the issue of missing category and tag controls when editing by changing the categories and tags with a quick edit from the All Posts page. However that would be a tedious process.
Needless to say, make sure you have a backup of your site before attempting any fixes
Platform
My basic setup for my sites is
- The latest version of WordPress. In this case it was 5.2.3
- Cloudflare from my host
- the Autoptimize plugin (Version 2.5.1)
- Gutenberg
Problem description
The problem was that I could not see the controls for categories and tags when editing an existing post. Below is what I SHOULD see. The categories and tags controls should be right above the Featured Image. I was seeing the controls in a new post.
What I was seeing instead was the Document tab without the Category and Tags controls
Missing WordPress Categories and Tags Solution
I approached this with the assumption that there might be a conflict between the Autoptimize plugin settings and Gutenberg. I went to the JS, CSS & HTML tab of the Autoptimize settings.
I toggled each group of settings starting from the bottom. The save button on that page will flush the Autoptimize cache.
I found it relatively quickly. I had originally set the HTML Options to not keep the HTML comments. Site users really don’t need them. BUT, when I enabled them and saved the settings, the Categories and Tags behaved as expected.
Update 9-13-19 – I found that for one of my sites, the above did not work. I had to disable ALL HTML optimization in that case.
Summary
I still have to thoroughly test the site. The page speed impact should be minimal since it will now be loading comments.
This is similar to a conflict with Autoptimize and Sassy Social Share.
WordPress is still rapidly evolving. Webmasters are trying to optimize their sites for speed and efficiency. This will inevitably lead to conflicts among plugins and WordPress itself.