WordPress – How to Bulk Delete Thousands of Posts and Pages

In this tutorial, we will show you how to bulk delete hundreds of WordPress posts or pages. Normally, you would have problems with your server if you try to remove thousands of posts or pages from your WordPress site. But with the post or page removal method that we will show you in this article, you will avoid any problems with your server, because we will remove the posts in batches.

There are several reasons why you might want to bulk delete your WordPress posts or pages:

• Content cleanup: Over time, your website may gather outdated or irrelevant content. Deleting posts or pages in bulk helps tidy up your site by removing information that is no longer useful or accurate.
• Site redesign: If you’re revamping your website or changing its focus, you may choose to eliminate a significant number of existing posts or pages that no longer align with the new vision or purpose of your WordPress website.
• Database optimization: Deleting unnecessary posts or pages can optimize your database size, leading to improved website performance and faster loading times.
• Security concerns: In some instances, websites may face security issues, and bulk deletion might be necessary to remove any malicious content or links injected into your posts or pages.
• Content migration: If you’re moving your website to a new platform or server, you might want to clean up your content during the process by bulk deleting specific posts or pages.

Important – Remember to always proceed with caution when performing bulk deletions of your WordPress content. These actions are irreversible, and valuable content could be lost, so make sure to have a backup of your website before making any significant changes.

To remove WordPress posts or pages in bulk, we will use the WP Sheet Editor – Post Types plugin.

It allows you to bulk manage pages, posts, and custom post types in a spreadsheet with advanced search and bulk editing tools, as well as export and import tools.

Once you install and activate the plugin, you need to open the spreadsheet you’ll use.

• Posts spreadsheet – Go to WP Sheet Editor > Edit Posts
• Pages spreadsheet – Go to WP Sheet Editor > Edit Pages

Note – In this tutorial, we will use the posts’ spreadsheet, but you can apply the same steps to the pages’ spreadsheet.

After you open the spreadsheet, you need to follow these simple steps to delete your posts or your pages.

Option 1 – Remove multiple posts or pages in the spreadsheet

If you want to remove multiple posts or pages in bulk, you can easily do it using the spreadsheet.

In this case, you just need to move to the Status column and select how you want to delete your posts.

You can select Trash or Delete completely, depending on how you want to bulk remove your posts or pages.

Once you have selected the values in all the posts you’ll delete, you need to click on Save to apply the changes.

This is a great way to eliminate WordPress content from your site, because you don’t have to spend lots of hours deleting the posts.

Option 2 – Bulk delete WordPress posts or pages

Now let’s take a look at how to bulk remove posts or pages using the Bulk Edit tool.

It allows you to edit any field on thousands of posts, so it can serve as a mass deletion tool by allowing you to delete all your posts, all posts from a specific search, or all posts you have manually selected in the spreadsheet.

1) Select the posts you’ll edit

There are three ways in which you can select the posts you will remove in bulk.

First, you can remove all your posts. If this is your case, you need to go to the next step.

Second, you can manually select the posts you want to remove.

Third, you can search for the posts you want to mass delete.

For this you can use the Search tool.

The Search tool allows you to filter your posts or pages by:

• Keyword
• Author
• Categories
• Tags
• Formats
• Status
• Date
• Featured image
• Template
• Etc.

In this example, we will run a combined search to find all posts by author, category and status.

After running the search, we will see all the posts matching the search terms displayed on the spreadsheet. We’ll see the active search filters above the spreadsheet.

2) Bulk remove your WordPress posts or pages

After selecting the posts or pages you will mass delete, you need to open the Bulk Edit tool.

Once there, you need to select the following values to remove your posts or pages:

• Select the rows that you want to update: This depends on which posts you want to remove.
• What field do you want to edit: Status
• Select type of edit: Set value
• Replace existing value with this value: Delete completely
• Click on Execute Now.

This is how you can massively remove your WordPress posts or pages and avoid any server errors due to server overload.

The WP Sheet Editor plugin simplifies the way you can manage WordPress posts, pages or custom post types.