Clean unused shortcodes

Clean unused shortcodes helps you find and remove shortcode tags left behind by old plugins, themes, or page builders — without hunting through posts one by one.

The tool lives under Tools → Clean unused shortcodes. Choose which public post types to scan, review the results, preview changes, then clean individual shortcodes or run a bulk cleanup.

Highlights

• Scan by post type — posts, pages, and other public types (media/attachments excluded).
• Three result tabs — unused (unregistered) shortcodes, used (registered and found), and registered but unused.
• Content and excerpts — scans both fields and shows where each shortcode appears.
• Batched operations — scan and clean large sites in chunks with a progress bar and cancel option.
• Incremental scan — optionally rescan only posts modified since the last run.
• Dry-run preview — see before/after snippets per post before saving.
• Protected shortcodes — allowlist tags you never want removed (e.g. caption, embed).
• Skip on clean all — exclude specific shortcodes from bulk cleanup.
• Gutenberg-aware — removes empty wp:shortcode blocks after the inner shortcode is stripped.
• Hyphenated names — detects shortcodes like [my-slider] as well as [gallery].

Who is this for?

• Sites that deactivated plugins but still have [shortcode] tags in content.
• Editors who want a clear list of where each tag appears before deleting.
• Administrators cleaning up legacy content on staging before going live.

Always back up your database (or test on staging) before running bulk clean operations.