Well, the default WordPress bulk edit feature for posts and pages is good. But with limitations. What are those limitations? What’s the easier and better way to bulk edit WordPress posts and pages from one place? You’ll learn in this article.
What’s good about bulk editing posts in WordPress? (Spoilers ahead)
Now, if your site has five to ten pages or posts, bulk editing may not be that helpful. But as your content marketing picks up, bulk editing will become a necessity.
Remember, without content marketing, you won’t survive the competition.
So, editing those five-ten posts that seemed like a walk in the park will now look like a big problem.
Fortunately, WordPress handles this well despite a few things (we’ll see that later).
The bulk options in WordPress allow you to bulk edit posts, categories, comments, authors, tags and even format.
Select either all of your posts or several posts you want to perform a bulk action on.
You’ll see something like this:
You can edit the following in bulk for posts
- Add categories and tags
- Change the author
- Turn the comments on or off
- Change the status of a post
- Change the format of a post
- Allow or end pingbacks
- Make posts sticky or not sticky
And for the pages, you can do these in bulk
- Change the author
- Add a parent page
- Change the template
- Turn comments on or off
- Change the status of the page
Another useful thing is the bulk delete. In the same Bulk Actions dropdown, you will see Move to Trash. This will delete all of the posts you have selected.
Ok, that’s a good number of options.
But here’s where WordPress bulk edit feature falls short
- You can’t view more than 20 posts or pages on one page.
- No provision to update keywords, meta description, all SEO fields.
- You can’t change the title, post content in bulk directly. You need to enter each post individually to make an edit.
- No provision to add media images or featured images directly.
- You cannot change posts’ publish dates in bulk
- Search filters are also ain’t that good
Now if you are doing content marketing and SEO, you can’t afford to waste time doing all the above tasks one by one.
You need a faster and robust solution that takes care of all these above tasks and makes your life easier.
That solution to bulk edit WordPress posts & pages is Smart Manager
Smart Manager is a very popular and powerful plugin that helps you manage all your WordPress posts and pages 10x faster.
The biggest USP of Smart Manager is the Batch Update or Batch Edit or Bulk Edit feature. All the same. You can bulk edit posts and pages quickly at once. Not just the default WordPress posts fields, but others as well.
Spreadsheet or sheet editor to manage all your posts and pages
- View all your posts, pages at one place in an Excel-like sheet editor.
- Batch update or mass update all WordPress core fields.
- Bulk edit post status, post categories, post date, SEO status, etc.
- Also directly edit post title, post content, post status, post excerpt, featured image, publish date, comment status, parent page, post categories, and post tags.
- Create WordPress pages from a spreadsheet, i.e create multiple posts at once.
- Delete posts at once – delete them permanently or move them to trash.
- Update ‘Product Gallery Images, Featured Images’ using the media library.
- Create custom views for posts and pages; like a view that consists only SEO-related fields.
- Search and delete posts. For example – delete all test posts in bulk.
- Copy information between posts.
- Sort the spreadsheet by any column.
- Edit hundreds of posts without reloading the page.
Quite flexible you see.
Use-case – How to quickly edit the year 2022 with 2023 / add 2023 in Post & Page titles, content and meta description?
Google loves fresh and updated content. So having 2023 in your content, SEO title, as well as meta description is a good ranking signal for Google to push you up in the search results.
We at StoreApps have used this hack in several post titles in the previous years like Best WooCommerce Gift Cards Plugins, Best WooCommerce Affiliate Plugins and others.
Now, being in 2023, the 2022 word in content needs to be replaced. But with hundreds of posts and pages, it’s a daunting and time-consuming task.
So, how can you accomplish it in less than five minutes? Using the Smart Manager plugin.
Big time-savings for people dealing with hundreds and thousands of posts. You don’t need to go through each post or page and make an edit. All are manageable from a single place.
Here’s how:
- Go your
WordPress admin panel > Smart Manager. - From the drop-down, select
Postsdashboard. - Enable Title, Content and other columns if not shown
- Click on the Advanced Search bar toggle, type ‘Title contains 2022’ if you want to replace existing ones.
- If there are fewer posts, directly edit data from the spreadsheet.
- For tens and hundreds of posts, go to
Bulk Edit > Post Title > search and replace. Enter the values as shown and Update.
That’s it.
And if your posts do not contain 2022 but you want to add 2023 to your existing post titles to boost SEO rankings, use the same Bulk Edit feature with Append function as shown in the image below.
Very cool, isn’t it?
Also edit Yoast SEO & RankMath SEO fields
Smart Manager is compatible with both Yoast and RankMath plugins. So you can bulk edit, direct edit, search and edit all SEO fields:
- Change focus keyword or focus keyphrase.
- Edit meta description.
- Change post title, content, status, publish date.
and others…
Other powerful Smart Manager features
- Bulk edit any fields of any post type – products, orders, coupons, posts, etc.
- Export CSV based on search, date and column filters.
- Add your own logo to packing slips/order printing and also print the same in bulk.
- Know the lifetime value (LTV) of all your customers along with their total purchases to date and last order details.
- Manage WordPress user roles – change user role, change password, etc.
- Compatibility with top WooCommerce plugins – Subscriptions, Bookings, Memberships, etc.
Conclusion
Whether you are editing posts, images, or even SEO titles, doing it one by one is tedious and unnecessary. Default WordPress is good.
But for a smooth editing experience like a spreadsheet, one-place editing of all fields including SEO fields quickly, there can’t be a better option than Smart Manager.