If you found this post, then you likely host a website using Tumblr. If your Tumblr theme is an older theme, then the breaking of your tags links probably started occurring on your site around October 2021.
Changes to Tagged and Searched URLs on Tumblr
Tumblr posted about this breaking update in the Changes on Tumblr blog. The article you want to read is titled, “Changes to Tagged and Searched URLs on Tumblr.”
Fortunately, there’s also a relatively simple way to revert and keep your legacy Tumblr theme working as it always has.
On my Tumblr site, which I started in 2004 with a cheaply purchased theme. Amazingly, I have not needed to provide any maintenance in eight years! Talk about an efficient process!
So, back to the Tumbl tag link. My site’s tagged links URLs used underscores to separate words. So for instance, my tagged Print Design URL has always been https://kellybarkhurst.com/tagged/print_design.
After the Tumblr update in 2021, multi-word tags defaulted to having spaces. The new URL for Print Design was now https://kellybarkhurst.com/tagged/print%20design. Note the %20 standing for space in the URL. This broke my site, my Work dropdown linking to portfolio categories was now broken.
Short-Term Fix
My short-term solution was simply to turn off the Tags dropdown menu. In Tumblr > Edit Appearance, I was able to toggle the option reading, “Enable Navigation Tags Dropdown.” This temporarily fixed my issue.
Long-Term Fix
After a bit of research, I realized there is a simple long-term fix to the issue, too. By default, when the change happened a toggle option was turned on for my theme. To fix the issue, I simply needed to find the toggle and turn it off.
In my theme’s edit panel, I scrolled down to URL Handling, and turned off the option to “Use better tagged and search URL decoding.”
This returned my URLs to underscores. Then, I was able to turn back on my dropdown tag navigation, too. Once again, now all is working as intended.
Hallelujah! And, here’s to another eight years of a maintenance-free portfolio site.
