The bulk options in WordPress are a great time saver, they are handy and easy to use, but are often overlooked. You can pretty much bulk update anything from posts, categories, comments, authors, tags and even format. It’s a beginner’s feature that hasn’t received enough love. I will take you through how to perform the updates, step by step.
Bulk update and edit posts
Bulk updating posts is something, which you might need in a number of situations. You can find the bulk update option in All Posts. You can select either all of your posts, or a number of posts that you want to perform a bulk action on. Go to Bulk Actions and click Edit.
When you have selected the posts you want to bulk update, click Apply. The posts you have selected will be grouped on the left hand side, a box will appear and you will have a number of options that you can bulk update.
Bulk update and edit categories
Under Bulk Edit, you will see all of the posts you are performing updates on. You can bulk update categories, that means you can choose to place all of the posts you have selected in a different/new category. This is helpful when you are remodeling your website, and need to adjust your categories. When you have selected the category, don’t forget to click update in the bottom right.
Bulk update and edit author
You can also update the author on all of the selected posts, if for example one of your authors created a new user profile and you wanted to make sure all of the posts were switched to the new user. Click on the new author, and then click update.
Bulk update and edit tags
One last example to show you in this screen is how to bulk update tags. It’s easy to forget to put in your tags, and often they are obvious and fit into a category. Below you can see I did a 30 day challenge, what the category doesn’t tell my readers is that it was a blogging challenge. So, I want to add a #bloggingchallenge tag to all of posts in that category.
First thing, I will use my filter, to select only the 30 day challenge category.
When I have them all selected, I will use the bulk update feature, by selecting Edit, then clicking Apply. I will get all of my posts in one place, where I will be able to type in #bloggingchallenge and click Update. All of my posts in that category now have the same tag.
Wrapping up
It’s a simple feature to use, and make sure you try out to bulk update and edit comments and status. Another thing that is very useful is the bulk delete, in the same bulk actions dropdown you will see Move to Trash. This will delete all of the posts you have selected.
WordPress bulk update post is one of the undiscovered gems of WordPress, it’s been there the whole time, yet not many people have come across it. Play around with WordPress, and let us know if you come across any other built-in features that can save you time or save you installing another plugin.