Is there a way to delete a custom field (in the sense of complete removal from WP database) without using a plugin?
1 Answer
If you have access to phpMyAdmin, these steps should do the trick:
Step 1: Login to your hosting account and launch myPHPadmin from the cPanel, or equivalent, to access the WordPress database engine.
Step 2: Enter a select SQL command to list all the meta keys you want to remove. In this example, I want to find and eventually remove the meta key dcssb_short_url.
SELECT * FROM 'wp_postmeta' where 'meta_key' = 'dcssb_short_url'
Step 3: Once you are satisfied you’ve narrowed down the selection, issue a delete SQL command to remove the rogue data
DELETE * FROM 'wp-postmeta' WHERE 'meta_key' = 'dcssb_short_url'
Step 4: Issue the same select SQL command again, to verify all the offending records have been deleted.
SELECT * FROM 'wp_postmeta' where 'meta_key' = 'dcssb_short_url'
If you get no results returned, it means that you successfully deleted the records.
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DELETE * FROM... is not required, probably DELETE FROM... should suffice. Jul 11, 2019 at 13:43