They may come a time when you need to remove all the products from your WooCommerce store, in fact, we had to do just that recently! There isn’t an easy way to do this natively in WooCommerce and if you have a lot of products, removing them in steps can be very time-consuming. When deleting products, you need to ensure you’re deleting all the additional data related to the product such as the taxonomy, relationships and so on. Basically, anything that is connecting to the products.
So to remove all your products safely and cleanly, you will need access your phpMyAdmin so that you can run a script on your database.
1. Login to Your phpMyAdmin
Let’s login to phpMyAdmin, before proceeding, make sure you are going to run the script on the correct database. As always, take a backup prior to running the script. To ensure you have the correct database loaded; you can always look for the table wp_options and ensure it has the correct URL for your website.
2. Run the SQL Statement
Ready to remove all your products in an instance? Then now you can click on the SQL tab and you should end up on a page like this:
Now simply paste the following code into the MySQL query to delete all products. NOTE: Ensure you take a backup of the database before proceeding, just in case.
DELETE relations.*, taxes.*, terms.*
FROM wp_term_relationships AS relations
INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy AS taxes
ON relations.term_taxonomy_id=taxes.term_taxonomy_id
INNER JOIN wp_terms AS terms
ON taxes.term_id=terms.term_id
WHERE object_id IN (SELECT ID FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type='product');
DELETE FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN (SELECT ID FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = 'product');
DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = 'product';
Press the ‘Go’ button to execute the above SQL statement.
Another note, if your database prefix is not the default wp_, you will need to replace this with the database prefix you are using.
3. Ensure All Products are Removed
If it all worked out, if you navigate to the products page, you should now end up with an empty Products list. Awesome right?
If you are removing products because you ran an importer than didn’t quite work out, you will now find that you may have duplicate media products if you were to run a fresh import. To remove the duplicated images, have a look at this post and it will solve your issue: How to Clean up Your WordPress Media Library.
As always, we hope you found this tutorial useful if you’ve used it for a project or was not able to run it successfully, let us know in the comments below!