How to delete all posts from a custom post type in WordPress

By Saruque Ahamed Mollick

Hello developers, I am here again to provide you very essential as well as a useful code snippet. I have found people deleting posts of a custom type using plugins or complicated database commands. But here I am gonna show you the easiest way to delete all posts of a custom post type without using plugins. So let’s see how to do that

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Delete all posts of a custom post type in WordPress without database commands

Before going to show you how to delete just consider that you have a custom post type.

and the post type is product 

It can be anything, I am just showing you with an example.

To delete all the posts from this custom post type you need to take a variable first.

$allposts= get_posts( array('post_type'=>'product','numberposts'=>-1) );
foreach ($allposts as $eachpost) {
  wp_delete_post( $eachpost->ID, true );
}

These three lines of code are enough to achieve our goal.

Now it’s time to explain what I have done.

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At first, we need to take a variable to get all the posts in it. We took $allposts variable here

Then we have used get_posts() method which is an inbuilt method of WordPress.

In that array we have passed ‘post_type’=>’product’. Remember product is our custom post type. You need to use the exact post type which is set under register_post_type.

'numberposts'=>-1

It is defined to -1 because -1 is for all the posts. and we want to get all the posts here.

Now Finally we have used a foreach loop to go through each post and delete all.

wp_delete_post( $eachpost->ID, true );

this is a WordPress function to delete posts. The first parameter is for the post ID. But here as $eachpost is an object so we need to use  $eachpost->ID to get the ID.

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We need to set the second parameter true to delete the posts.

3 responses to “How to delete all posts from a custom post type in WordPress”

1. Vladimir Kogan says:

   February 9, 2020 at 2:55 pm

   Unbelievable! Your solution works great!Thank you very much, Saruque!

   Reply
2. Saruque Ahamed Mollick says:

   February 9, 2020 at 3:22 pm

   I am glad that it helped you. Keep visiting our site and happy coding.

   Reply
3. Ros says:

   September 11, 2020 at 7:00 pm

   Hi Saruque. Is it possible to use a similar script to yours above to bulk delete all draft products? I tried your code in functions.php and replaced ‘product’ with ‘draft’ but the 4 test products I have in draft are still there. As you can tell, coding is not my expertise!

   Reply