By default, WordPress allows users to create two visible post types – post and page. You can create posts and pages from the site’s administrator panel by navigating to “Posts > Add New” and “Pages > Add New” section respectively. In addition, you have invisible post types like attachments, revisions and autosaves. However, only having posts and pages is not sufficient for many site owners and here comes the use of custom post types. If you have created custom post types and wanted to convert them into a standard posts, here is how you can do that.
WordPress Custom Post Types
Most of the commercial themes and plugins allow users to create custom post type content. This is useful to have a special content separately without mixing with the blog post feed. Here are some of the examples of custom post type users commonly using on their site.
Generally, you can create all these content types using standard post setup. However, many commercial themes offer custom post types with unique design in order not to mix with standard post’s design. Below is an example of custom post types showing in the admin menu for Manual knowledge base theme.
Converting Custom Post Type to Post
There are many situations you need to convert custom post type content to standard post or page.
Note: WordPress also offers different post format like gallery, aside, audio, video, etc. for posts. You can use them with post type as “post”. Do not confuse post format with post type.
How to Convert Custom Post Types to Posts?
Unfortunately, there is no complete solution available for converting custom post types to posts including your custom categories and custom tags. Therefore, you have to follow multiple steps to change the setup.
1. Converting Custom Post Types
The first step in the process is converting your custom content to standard posts.
This will convert the selected custom post type content to standard posts. You can view the converted posts by navigating to “Posts > All Posts” section.
2. Convert Custom Categories
As you can see, the plugin did not assign any categories to the converted posts. When you view the post in browser, WordPress will assign the default category to all converted posts.
The next step is to create the same category setup for your custom and standard posts. This is a manual step that you need to manually create your custom categories as standard post categories under “Posts > Categories” section.
Remember, this step is not required if your custom post type uses the same WordPress categories. Plugins like Custom Post Type UI offers this function of using WordPress categories for custom post types. However, commercial themes and many other plugins create custom posts independently of the standard WordPress posts.
After creating categories, go to “Posts > All Posts” section and select the converted posts. Select “Edit” option from “Bulk actions” and click “Apply” button. Here, you can assign the category in bulk for all converted posts, click on “Update” button to apply the selected category to all posts.
3. Convert Custom Tags
Similar to converting your custom categories, make sure to convert all your custom tags into standard WordPress tags under “Posts > Tags” section. After this, you can bulk assign categories similar to bulk assigning category as explained above.
4. Setup 301 Redirect
This is a final and important step in completing the process. Since all your custom posts are deleted, you need to setup a redirect to new posts. This will help search engines and users to access the new posts when they try to access your custom post content. We recommend not to change the slug so that you can use regex redirection for custom posts, categories and tags easily.
The good part is that plugins like Redirection can help you to setup automatic redirects when you converting post types. Before start converting your custom post types to posts, first install and activate Redirection plugin on your site.
You can enable URL monitoring when setting up the plugin using the setup wizard. If you did not setup or want to confirm the setup, go to “Tools > Redirection > Options” and make sure to enable URL monitoring for posts. Since, you are deleting custom post types there is no need to select them for monitoring.
If you are not using Redirection plugin, or already converted all custom post types to posts then use following regex for redirection. The below example is to redirect all knowledgebase custom post types to standard posts. You can replace the knowledgebase with your custom post type name.
At any case, you need to setup redirects for categories and tags manually and you can use regex for this purpose as well.
Converting Single Custom Posts
The Post Type Switcher plugin also allows you to convert individual custom post type to post. For this, you can edit the custom post type and click on the post type link on the document panel sidebar in Gutenberg editor. select the post type you want to convert and publish your post.
The plugin also supports conversion if you are using Classic editor. you can click on “Edit” link against post type under “Publish” meta box and choose your new post type.
Final Words
Custom post types are attractive to create beautiful content. However, it can easily clutter your admin panel and slow down your WordPress site. Many users also regret using lot of custom post types that come with the theme. We hope this article helped you to convert custom post types to posts and retain your search engine rankings.
This content was originally published here.