How to bulk edit posts in WordPress

Often, you want to change the status, categories or tags of multiple posts in WordPress at once. You can do so by opening each post individually and make the changes one at a time, but it’s time consuming and cumbersome, and it’s easy to make a mistake when you’re making the same change for the twentieth time. Thankfully, WordPress has a feature that allows you to make changes to multiple posts (or other post types) in one go.

The feature is called bulk edit. In this example, we’re going to update categories for a couple of posts.

1. First, log in to the WordPress administration panel.
2. Next, click the “Posts” link in the menu on the left.
3. In the list of posts, there’s a checkbox on the left of each post title. Check the boxes on the posts you want to edit. If you want to select all posts on the current page, click the checkbox at the very top of the list, on the left of the “Title” table heading.
4. When you have selected the posts you want to edit, you click the dropdown marked “Bulk actions” on the left above the posts list. Select “Bulk edit” in the list, and click the “Apply” button on its right.
5. The Bulk Edit panel will open at the top of the posts list. Here, you can see all of the settings you can update. By default, those settings for regular posts are:
   • What posts you want to bulk edit. If you want to remove one of the posts you’ve selected from the edit, you can click the cross on its left in the list.
   • Categories. In the list, a category with an empty checkbox means that no post you’ve selected is assigned to that category. A checkbox with a dash (–) means that some of the posts are in that category. A checkbox with a checkmark means that all of them are in that category. You can add your posts to existing categories here, but not create new categories altogether.
   • Tags. Any tags you enter are added to all of the posts you’re bulk editing. Posts will keep any tags they have already.
   • Author.
   • Template.
   • Comments. Whether they should be allowed or not for the selected posts.
   • Status. Can be set to published, private, pending review, or draft.
   • Pings. Whether they should be allowed or not for the selected posts.
   • Sticky. Whether the selected posts should be set as sticky, and be shown at the top of the posts list on your blog page.
6. Make the changes you want to make to the posts you’ve selected, and click “Update” to apply them. Done!

If you want to bulk edit even more posts than the 20 that WordPress lists on each page by default, you can click the “Screen Options” tab in the top right of the page. Next, change “Number of items per page” to a higher value. That will allow you to select and bulk edit more posts each time.