Clean unused shortcodes vs WP-Sweep

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. Editors who want a clear list of where each tag appears before deleting. Administrators cleaning up legacy content on staging before going live. Always back up your database (or test on staging) before running bulk clean operations.

WP-Sweep finds the rows WordPress leaves behind and removes them. Revisions of posts you edited years ago, meta belonging to a post that was deleted, terms attached to nothing, term relationships pointing at posts that no longer exist, expired transients: none of it is visible anywhere in wp-admin, and all of it is in your database. It uses the proper WordPress delete functions wherever they can reach the row, rather than running raw delete queries, so the hooks other plugins rely on still fire. Only the rows the API refuses to touch — orphaned meta whose object ID is 0 — are deleted directly. Features Revisions Auto drafts Deleted posts Unapproved comments Spammed comments Deleted comments Orphaned post meta Orphaned comment meta Orphaned user meta Orphaned term meta Orphaned term relationships Unused terms Duplicated post meta Duplicated comment meta Duplicated user meta Duplicated term meta Transient options oEmbed caches in post meta Optimizes database tables Delete functions used wp_delete_post_revision() wp_delete_post() wp_delete_comment() delete_post_meta() delete_comment_meta() delete_user_meta() delete_term_meta() wp_remove_object_terms() wp_delete_term() delete_transient() delete_site_transient() Known incompatibilities These plugins keep data in places WP-Sweep reads as orphaned. Protect their meta keys with the filters under Usage before sweeping. Custom Fonts Elementor Popup Builder MailPress Meta Slider Polylang Slider Revolution Viba Portfolio WPML Donations I spent most of my free time creating, updating, maintaining and supporting these plugins, if you really love my plugins and could spare me a couple of bucks, I will really appreciate it. If not feel free to use it without any obligations. Usage Every sweep is irreversible, so back your database up first. The screen lists every sweep with a short description of what it removes, how many items that is, and what proportion of the table they are. Tick the ones you want and use the Sweep bulk action, or use each row’s Sweep and Details buttons one at a time. Nothing on the screen needs JavaScript: the buttons are ordinary links and the bulk action is an ordinary form. There is no settings screen. The one thing worth tuning — how many items Details lists, 500 by default — is the wp_sweep_limit_details filter. The cap exists because the whole sample is held in memory and written into the page. WP-CLI wp sweep --all wp sweep revisions wp sweep revisions auto_drafts deleted_posts REST API All three routes need the activate_plugins capability. GET /wp-json/sweep/v1/count/ GET /wp-json/sweep/v1/details/ DELETE /wp-json/sweep/v1/sweep/ Item names revisions, `auto_drafts`, `deleted_posts`, `unapproved_comments`, `spam_comments`, `deleted_comments`, `transient_options`, `orphan_postmeta`, `orphan_commentmeta`, `orphan_usermeta`, `orphan_termmeta`, `orphan_term_relationships`, `unused_terms`, `duplicated_postmeta`, `duplicated_commentmeta`, `duplicated_usermeta`, `duplicated_termmeta`, `optimize_database`, `oembed_postmeta`. Filters wp_sweep_postmeta_whitelist (array) — post meta keys that must never be deleted, by the orphaned or the duplicated post meta sweep. * matches any run of characters. Default: empty. wp_sweep_commentmeta_whitelist (array) — the same, for comment meta. wp_sweep_usermeta_whitelist (array) — the same, for user meta. wp_sweep_termmeta_whitelist (array) — the same, for term meta. wp_sweep_excluded_taxonomies (array) — taxonomies left out of the orphaned term relationships sweep. Default: array( 'link_category' ). wp_sweep_excluded_termids (array) — term IDs left out of the unused terms sweep. Default: each taxonomy’s default term, plus any term that is the parent of another. wp_sweep_limit_details (int) — how many items a Details list shows. Default: 500. wp_sweep_defer_counts (bool) — whether the Sweep screen renders first and fetches its counts afterwards, one at a time. Return false to compute every count with the page, as versions before 2.0.1 always did. Default: true. wp_sweep_capability (string $capability, string $context) — the capability required. $context is one of sweep, ajax or rest. wp_sweep_total_count (int $count, string $name) — the total number of rows a sweep’s percentage is measured against. wp_sweep_count (int $count, string $name) — how many items a sweep would remove. wp_sweep_details (array $details, string $name) — the sample list shown by Details. wp_sweep_sweep (string $message, string $name) — the message reported after a sweep has run. Actions wp_sweep_admin_post_sweep, `wp_sweep_admin_comment_sweep`, `wp_sweep_admin_user_sweep`, `wp_sweep_admin_term_sweep`, `wp_sweep_admin_option_sweep` and `wp_sweep_admin_database_sweep` all fire below the sweep table, in that order. Protect specific post meta keys from being swept: add_filter( 'wp_sweep_postmeta_whitelist', function ( $meta_keys ) { $meta_keys[] = '_my_plugin_setting'; $meta_keys[] = '_acme_*'; return $meta_keys; } ); Exclude an additional taxonomy from the orphaned term relationships sweep: add_filter( 'wp_sweep_excluded_taxonomies', function ( $taxonomies ) { $taxonomies[] = 'product_type'; return $taxonomies; } );