Shortcodes are great, but they're not always the best way. One drawback of using a plugin or theme that relies on shortcodes is that when you change a theme or disable the plugin, they will leave shortcode tags on your posts, which will seem strange to your readers. In this article, we will show you how to find and remove unused shortcodes from your WordPress posts and pages.
No , absolutely not. Shortcodes are not bad, but overuse can be problematic. For example, we use the Compact Archives plugin, which provides a shortcode and a template tag. We have the shortcode only on our archives page, so if we ever disable that plugin, there is only one page we need to remove the shortcode.
On the other hand, there are plugins and themes that provide shortcodes to create common styling elements like buttons, tables, columns, etc. Some ad management plugins also use shortcodes. Now if a user has used these shortcodes in many posts then it is very difficult for users to remove the shortcode from all posts and pages.
This is why we advise our users not to rely on themes or plugins that require you to add shortcodes in many posts. You should always try to find a better alternative if you can, or contact the author of the theme or plugin. They may point you to a better way to get the same functionality without using too many shortcodes in posts or pages.
For those who are still wondering, if you have an inactive shortcode on your site, then it will look like this in the middle of your content:
[random shortcode]
To remove unused shortcodes from your posts and pages, you need to find them first.
We will try the easiest approach to find the shortcode within the post content. Simply copy and paste the following code into a site-specific plugin or your theme's functions.php file:
función wpb_find_shortcode ($ atts, $ content = null) ob_start (); extraer (shortcode_atts (array ('find' => ",), $ atts)); $ string = $ atts ['find']; $ args = array ('s' => $ string,); $ the_query = new WP_Query ($ args); if ($ the_query-> have_posts ()) echo 'In this code, we have created a shortcode (how ironic is that? ). The shortcode executes a function to run a custom WordPress query. In this query, we are using the default WordPress search function to find the shortcode and then list all the posts found with that specific shortcode.
To use this, you need to create a new WordPress post or page and paste this shortcode inside it:
[shortcodefinder find = "myshortcode"]
Replace myshortcode with the shortcode tag you are looking for. Save your post or page as a draft and then preview it. This will allow you to see a list of all posts that contain the shortcode tag you searched for.
Unfortunately, the best way to remove unused shortcodes from your posts is by manually editing each post that contains the shortcode. In the method described above, we showed you how to get a list of posts that contain a particular shortcode. Hopefully this will save you some time. Once you have the list, you can go through the posts one by one and remove the shortcode.
Alternatively, if you don't want to edit your posts one by one, then there's a quick fix that hides the shortcode so it doesn't appear in your content. Simply paste the following code into a site-specific plugin or your theme's functions.php file:
add_shortcode ('shortcodetag', '__return_false');
You would need to replace shortcodetag with the shortcode that appears in your posts or the shortcode that you want to hide.
Basically the code above will add the shortcode and not display anything. This way, your shortcode will be parsed like any other registered shortcode, but without displaying anything in the output. If there are multiple unused shortcodes in your posts, you can reuse this code by simply replacing the shortcode with the shortcode you want to hide.
We hope this article helped you find and remove unused shortcodes from your WordPress posts or pages. For questions and comments please leave a comment below.