Introducing Filter My Blog: A Tag Filter for Shopify Blogs

Why I built Filter My Blog, a Shopify app that adds a tag filter bar to your blog so readers find the posts they want.

Marti BeleguSenior Developer · Founder of Filter My BlogPublished October 9, 2026Updated October 9, 20264 min read

Filter My Blog is a Shopify app that adds a tag filter bar to your blog's listing page. Readers click a tag, like "Recipes" or "Beginner guides", and see only the articles with that tag. You set which tags appear, their order and the bar's look from inside the Shopify admin. There's no theme code to write, and the free plan covers every blog.

It went live on the Shopify App Store this week. This post is the story behind it: the problem, what I learned building it, and who it's for.

The problem: tags that do nothing for readers

Most Shopify stores that blog already tag their posts. The recipe is tagged "vegan". The care guide is tagged "linen". Then the theme shows every article in one long list, newest first, and none of those tags help a reader find anything.

The odd part is that Shopify already does the hard work. Every tag gets its own filtered page at /blogs/<blog>/tagged/<tag>, created automatically. Most themes, Dawn included, just never link to those pages from the blog. A reader who wants your vegan recipes has to scroll and hope.

I wrote up the free ways to fix that in How to Filter Shopify Blog Posts by Tag, including a Liquid snippet you can paste in today. If that's all you need, use it. Filter My Blog is for when you want more than a list of links.

What the app does

The listing's tagline sums it up: readers find the posts they want instead of scrolling. In practice that means:

• A tag filter bar above your articles, styled to match your theme. There are eight style presets, then colours, corners, spacing and fonts to fine-tune. See style presets.
• Your tags, curated. Show or hide each tag, rename it for display, and order tags alphabetically, by hand, or by number of articles. Renaming only changes the label on the bar. The tag on your articles stays as it is. See showing, hiding and renaming tags.
• Every blog in your store. Each blog gets its own tag settings.
• Real links underneath. Every tag pill links to Shopify's own tagged page, so filtering works without JavaScript and every tag page stays crawlable for search engines.

The paid plans add article counts, blog search, multi-select filtering, search as you type, and analytics showing which tags readers click and what they search for. The pricing page has the full comparison.

What I learned building it: Dawn and Horizon are different worlds

I expected a tag filter to be a weekend project. It wasn't, mostly because Shopify's two main free theme families treat the blog page very differently.

Dawn's blog section has no room for blocks. An app can't place anything inside it. So on Dawn the filter is added as its own section above the blog. That works fine, but it means the filter can't redraw the article grid. Every tag click is a normal page load to the tagged URL. That's how most blogs on the web work, so readers don't mind, but it rules out instant filtering.

Horizon's blog section accepts app blocks. The filter can sit inside the same section as the articles. That lets it fetch only the updated article list from Shopify and swap it in without a reload, while the URL still changes, so links can be shared and the back button works.

The rule I settled on: never guess from the theme's name. The script checks whether the page it fetched actually contains an article grid it can swap. If it does, filtering is instant. If it doesn't, the plain links do the job. Nothing breaks either way.

Two smaller lessons came out of the same work:

• Liquid can't count articles per tag. blog.all_tags is a list of strings with no counts. To show "Recipes (12)", the app reads your articles in the background each night and counts every tag across the whole blog.
• Shopify has no URL that searches one blog. Its search covers products, pages and articles at once. On themes that support it, the app's blog search reuses your theme's own article cards, so results look exactly like the rest of your blog.

Who it's for

Filter My Blog is for stores whose blog has grown past a page or two: recipes, guides, journals, lookbooks. If readers have to scroll to find a topic, a filter bar helps.

It's also for the agencies and freelancers who look after those stores. There's no theme code to maintain, so a theme update or switch doesn't break anything you've set up.

If your blog has five posts, you don't need it yet. Bookmark the free Liquid method and come back when it grows.

Getting started

1. Install Filter My Blog from the Shopify App Store. It only asks for read-only access to your blog content.
2. The app finds your tags automatically. There's nothing to import.
3. Pick a style, then add the block to your blog template from the theme editor. The setup guide walks through it for Dawn and Horizon.

It takes about five minutes. If you want to know how the app protects your store first, read how I built it to stay safe. If anything doesn't work the way this post describes, get in touch. Messages come straight to me.