How to delete all posts from a custom post type?

I want to delete all posts from a custom post type "TV-Serie". The number of all posts in this post type are 150,000. Moreover, when I try to delete them all manually while selecting more than 500 posts at once this provides "timeout error".

Any idea on how to delete them all?

I want to delete all posts from a custom post type "TV-Serie". The number of all posts in this post type are 150,000. Moreover, when I try to delete them all manually while selecting more than 500 posts at once this provides "timeout error".

Any idea on how to delete them all?

• custom-post-types
• posts
• customization

Share Improve this question asked Aug 3, 2019 at 16:59 Zulkifl AghaZulkifl Agha 3144 bronze badges 3

• It may be possible to do a raw SQL "DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE wp_posts.post_type='TV-Serie'; ". I'm not convinced that is the best or even a recommended way to do it but it would remove the records (brutally). Seriously, use with the utmost caution; this could go very wrong with the smallest error. – Matthew Brown aka Lord Matt Commented Aug 4, 2019 at 1:47
• My post type is episodes and while submitting the SQL querry as: DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE wp_posts.post_type='episodes'; which provides the following error: "Error in processing request - Error code: 524 Error text: error" – Zulkifl Agha Commented Aug 6, 2019 at 8:41
• You got me there, I cannot find that error code in Google. Try LIMIT 500? This one might be beyond me. – Matthew Brown aka Lord Matt Commented Aug 7, 2019 at 23:30

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Few method or approaches you can take to delete all posts from a custom post type.

1 Use WP-CLI (WordPress Command Line Interface)

If you have access to WP-CLI, you can use the following command to delete all posts from your custom post type.

wp post delete $(wp post list --post_type=your_custom_post_type --format=ids)

Replace your_custom_post_type with the slug of your custom post type. This command will list all post IDs of the specified post type and then delete them one by one

2 Delete Posts Programmatically in Batches

Delete posts programmatically within WP, you can write a custom script to delete posts in batches.

Add code in your themes functions.php file or in a custom plugin

function delete_posts_in_batches() {
    $post_type = 'your_custom_post_type';
    $args = array(
        'post_type' => $post_type,
        'posts_per_page' => 500, // Adjust the number of posts to delete per batch
        'fields' => 'ids', // Retrieve only post IDs to improve performance
    );

    $posts = get_posts($args);

    if ($posts) {
        foreach ($posts as $post_id) {
            wp_delete_post($post_id, true); // Set second parameter to true to force delete
        }
    }
}

// Call the function to start deleting posts
delete_posts_in_batches();

You can place this code in your theme's functions.php file or in a custom plugin. Adjust the 'posts_per_page' parameter according to your server's capabilities to avoid timeout errors

3 Increase Server Timeout

you can try increasing the maximum execution time and memory limit to prevent timeout errors during the deletion process