Delete all posts of a custom post type—efficiently

Question

I'm looking for a safe and fast way to delete all of one custom post type's posts. Using get_posts() and wp_delete_post() for each returned post does not work; it's not fast enough due to the sheer amount of database queries involved (timeout error).

Preferably, I'm looking for a single database query to run that deletes all posts that are of a custom post type. Any thoughts?

Answer 1

You can delete all post via $wpdb

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type='post_type';
DELETE FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id NOT IN (SELECT id FROM wp_posts);
DELETE FROM wp_term_relationships WHERE object_id NOT IN (SELECT id FROM wp_posts)

or use this query replace it with {{your CPT}} with your Custom Post Type

DELETE a,b,c
    FROM wp_posts a
    LEFT JOIN wp_term_relationships b
        ON (a.ID = b.object_id)
    LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta c
        ON (a.ID = c.post_id)
    WHERE a.post_type = '{{your CPT}}';

Answer 2

This can now be done with the WordPress CLI using wp post delete. Once the CLI is installed, the following terminal command (while in your site's root directory) will delete all posts of type mycustomtype:

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

No raw SQL (*shudder*), no worrying about timeouts, and it's fast. For example, I just deleted ~2500 posts in less than two minutes.

To skip Trash and delete it completely use --force

Answer 3

You can delete all posts of a custom post type in various methods but here I am gonna show you how to do this without using SQL query. Here, for example, our post type is product

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

See full tutorial Reference Here

Answer 4

If you have prefixed your CPT post type and your CPT taxonomies with eg. 'abc_my_custom_post_type' and 'abc_my_taxonomy' then it's trivial to remove everything from db with two queries:

DELETE a,b
FROM      $wpdb->posts    a
LEFT JOIN $wpdb->postmeta b ON a.ID = b.post_id
WHERE a.post_type LIKE 'abc_%';
            
DELETE a,b,c
FROM      $wpdb->term_taxonomy      a
LEFT JOIN $wpdb->term_relationships b ON a.term_taxonomy_id = b.term_taxonomy_id
LEFT JOIN $wpdb->terms              c ON a.term_id = c.term_id
WHERE a.taxonomy LIKE 'abc_%'