How to Bulk Edit WordPress Posts

Go to Posts → All Posts, tick the posts, choose Bulk actions → Edit, click Apply, change the fields in the panel and click Update. Every selected post receives the change in one pass, with no plugin.

1. Open Screen Options (top right of All Posts) and raise “Number of items per page” — it accepts up to 999 — so all target posts fit on one screen.
2. Filter the list first by category, date or status, so the header checkbox selects only what you mean.
3. Tick the posts, or the header checkbox to select every row on the current page.
4. Choose Bulk actions → Edit and click Apply; the bulk panel opens above the list.
5. Change only the fields you need, leave the rest on “— No Change —”, and click Update.

The panel reports how many posts were updated. Posts open in another editor’s session are skipped as locked, so re-run the edit for those once the other user closes them.

Categories yes, tags no: current WordPress removes a category you untick in the bulk panel, but tags typed into the panel are only ever added. The function’s own description still says it adds “but not removing” terms; the code now handles categories differently.

When you open the bulk panel, a category held by some but not all selected posts shows as partly ticked. WordPress leaves those as they are on each post, adds any category you tick fully, and removes a category you untick that every selected post had. At least one category must remain ticked for the category change to apply.

To remove a tag from many posts, delete the tag itself under Posts → Tags if it is no longer wanted anywhere, or use WP-CLI on the server:

# remove the tag "offer-2024" from every post that has it
for id in $(wp post list --tag=offer-2024 --field=ID); do
  wp post term remove "$id" post_tag offer-2024
done

Use WP-CLI or a spreadsheet-style bulk editor plugin; the dashboard has no tool for editing post content or featured images across many posts. Test any such change on a staging copy before running it on the live site.

• Find and replace a URL: wp search-replace 'http://old-domain.com' 'https://new-domain.com' --dry-run shows what would change; run it again without --dry-run. It handles serialised data that a raw SQL REPLACE() would corrupt.
• Set a featured image: the image is stored as the _thumbnail_id post meta, so wp post meta update 123 _thumbnail_id 456 sets attachment 456 on post 123.
• Custom fields: wp post meta update works the same way for any meta key.
• No shell access: phpMyAdmin can run SQL, but write a SELECT with the same WHERE clause first and confirm the rows; the cPanel MySQL database guide shows how to reach it.

Create the test copy with a WordPress staging site, and remember that WordPress table names may use a prefix other than wp_.