Remove all unused shortcodes from your WordPress posts

A few weeks ago, I’ve made a total revamp of my website (the one you’re on). The old one was 6 years old, and for some obscure reasons I used shortcodes to add columns or deviders to my content. During the revamp, I had to remove all this shortcodes, but I didn’t wan’t to search en edit all posts manually (I’ve more than an hundred posts on the blog), so I wrote a very simple function to do that.

I firstly tried to use the strip_shortcodes with strip_shortcodes_tagnames filter, but the problem is that this hook removes the shortcode AND it content. So in my case, it removed the columns shortcode and the columns content (eg: [column]Will be removed too[/column]). Not accurate anought for my need.

I finally decided to make it simple and use a REGEX with the content_save_pre hook which is fired right before saving the content in the database. Doing this, I only have to bulk update my posts to stripes all the shortcodes I don’t want anymore.

All you have to do is to provide the list of shortcodes you don’t want anymore by filling the $tags_to_remove array.

add_action( 'content_save_pre', 'bweb_remove_shortcodes', 9, 2 );
function bweb_remove_shortcodes( $content  ) {
	
	$tags_to_remove = array(
		'shortcode_to_remove_1',
		'shortcode_to_remove_2',
	);

	foreach( $tags_to_remove as $tag ){
		$content = preg_replace('#\[[^\[]*' . $tag . '[^\]]*\]#', '', $content );
	}

	return $content;

}

I’ve done bulk actions with 30 posts each time without an issue, but it also works when editing a single post. I suggest you to do that first to make sure the function is working properly for you. When you’re done, simply remove the function 😉

Don’t use this function on your stage site!