Clean unused shortcodes for WordPress

Clean unused shortcodes helps you find and remove shortcode tags left behind by old plugins, themes, or page builders — without hunting through posts one by one.

The tool lives under Tools → Clean unused shortcodes. Choose which public post types to scan, review the results, preview changes, then clean individual shortcodes or run a bulk cleanup.

Highlights

Scan by post type — posts, pages, and other public types (media/attachments excluded).

Three result tabs — unused (unregistered) shortcodes, used (registered and found), and registered but unused.

Content and excerpts — scans both fields and shows where each shortcode appears.

Batched operations — scan and clean large sites in chunks with a progress bar and cancel option.

Incremental scan — optionally rescan only posts modified since the last run.

Dry-run preview — see before/after snippets per post before saving.

Protected shortcodes — allowlist tags you never want removed (e.g. caption, embed).

Skip on clean all — exclude specific shortcodes from bulk cleanup.

Gutenberg-aware — removes empty wp:shortcode blocks after the inner shortcode is stripped.

Hyphenated names — detects shortcodes like [my-slider] as well as [gallery].

Who is this for?

Sites that deactivated plugins but still have [shortcode] tags in content.