When the time comes to clean your post taxonomy house, it’s good to get rid of old or non representative tags, categories, or custom taxonomies. Every time I remove one however, I get that nagging feeling – what if all these posts get deleted too…
Not to fear. Deleting a tag, category, or taxonomy will not delete associated posts. Here’s what happens when you do the delete:
- The taxonomy itself is removed All terms (categories/tags) within that taxonomy are deleted
- The relationship/connections between posts and the taxonomy terms are removed
- The actual posts remain intact in the database
Reasons to be cautious
You should still be cautious when deleting taxonomies because:
- You’ll lose the organizational structure those taxonomies provided
- The posts will lose those classification/filtering capabilities
- Any templates or functions relying on that taxonomy will need to be updated
- The URLs for archives of those taxonomy terms will stop working
