Are you looking for a quick and easy way to delete a lot of articles and posts on
your website? Well keep watching. In this video I'll show you two methods you can
use to bulk delete in WordPress
The first method uses the built-in functionality of WordPress where you
just go in and delete all of the items that you need to. To show you how to do
that let's head over to our WordPress dashboard. You want to go over to the
area that you need to delete in this case we're deleting a lot of posts but
you can also delete pages or other types of categories if you have those as well.
So I'm going to go to Posts, All Posts and you can click on the check mark up
here and that will highlight all of the posts on the page and then from here you
can exclude any of them that you don't want deleted. Once you have everything
checked that you want you can go up to bulk actions and click move to trash and
then click apply, and what that will do is it will, and what that'll do is it
will move everything over to the trash area. Which, where you can go and
permanently delete them or restore if you need to. Now that is great if you
have just a few that you want to delete by default the WordPress dashboard only
shows 20 posts at a time but if you have several hundred that you want to delete
at once that can get a little tedious so to change that you can go up to your
screen options area and number of items per page you can change that to as much
as 999 and that will show, in most cases that'll show, most of the blog
posts and then once you click apply it'll show all of those on one page and
you can do the same thing. Just click all of them and deselect the ones that you
don't want to delete and move to trash like we did before.
So that's method one and for most people that'll be exactly what you need. Once
you go through and delete everything you want if there was an issue and you
accidentally deleted something, simply go up to your trash area, select the ones
that you need and from bulk actions you can restore that. From here you can also
delete permanently if you really don't want them anymore.
So that's a great way to keep track of the posts that you've deleted. So I'm
going to go back to the all area. Now what if you just want to delete certain
things from a particular author or a particular category? Well in that case
you can click on the author here and I'll simply show all of the posts that
were written by that author and then you could delete them there and then if you
need to delete the posts by the category you can click on the category just like
we did author and then select all the posts to delete like this. Now the second
method is for if you need a little bit more control over what you're deleting.
So to do this we're going to add a plugin. So let's head over to our
plugins area and click add new. From the search area you want to search for bulk
delete plugin. This is the one we're looking for so go ahead and click
install now and once it's installed you'll also want to make sure that you
click activate. Now that it's activated you'll see an area over here called bulk WP.
So we can click on that to get started and you'll notice right now
there's a Big ol warning saying posts that are deleted cannot be retrieved.
In fact if you really are wanting to delete something this might be a good time to
go ahead and backup your website in case something unexpected happens. From here
you can see the types of posts that you can delete. Most of ours are published
you can also delete any drafts that you may have and then down here you have a
little bit more filtering options you can only delete older posts that are say
older than 30 days, you can choose to move them to trash or if you want to be
bold delete them permanently, you can choose to only delete the first number
of posts that you want, and then down here you can also do categories so if
you want to delete all the posts that have a particular category you can click
on here to find the category posts that you want to delete and again you have
some filtering options that you want to do.
If you have tags involved you could delete by tag and then if you also had
custom taxonomies you can delete those here you can also delete your custom
post types or if you know the permalink of the post you can put that in here.
If you want to clean up your revisions then you can delete all of the revisions. The
revisions are when you're editing a post and you click update WordPress will
automatically make a previous revision of that so that you can review it and
see which one you want to keep. That can build up on your database so if you
would like you can remove all of those here and then when you've picked
everything that you want to delete you can simply click bulk delete and it will
ask you to verify and then it will delete those items and then when you see
once you've deleted it it'll give you a notification that one item has been
deleted from that category. So those are two very easy ways to do bulk delete on
your WordPress website. Did you learn something from today's
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to help you manage your WordPress website and thanks for watching