How to Move Posts from a Category to Another Category WITHOUT Plugin in WordPress

2016-02-23


We mentioned we created too many categories on our WordPress blog site since we kept posting in passed 10 years but did not have good time to maintain entire website structure. Now we have to finish multiple tasks. Cleaning up existing categories is the one of important tasks.

Our current WordPress edtion is 4.4.2 which is the newest one currently. We thought it has already provided the Category moving function but actually it did not.

Can Bulk Actions Do The Job ?

We saw in Post management view there is Bulk Actions. However, when we tried to select multiple posts and then select bulk edit actions, we could not remove existing post’s category type but only could add a new category type on all selected posts;

Then we searched using Google, there were seems lots of bloggers used several WordPress plugins, which is not the topic we are going to talk about here; How to Move Posts from a Category to Another Category WITHOUT a plugin ?

We remember we have a post named “Delete a WordPress Category will Delete All Posts under It ? ”, so why don’t we try the way of deleting a category since all related posts will be still exist ?

1: First we set the target category as the default category:

Settings –> Writing –> Default Post Category, change to task category and then click Save Chang button on the bottom of page;

Move posts from one category to another category

2: Delete category which you want to move out all posts from it:

Posts –> Categories to open the Categories management page, select the category which we wanted to delete, and clicked Delete link.

(Note: If a Category has been set a parent category of other categories, this category can NOT be deleted. If you want to delete it you will have to move away all its sub categories first)

image

3: Your posts were removed during the category deleting process

Now go back to set the default category to the original one, OR, if you want to do more categories clean up works, just repeat above steps.

Done.