How to Quickly Remove All Articles in Joomla

In this day and age, everyone wants more content on their website (after all, content is king), so for many, this post won’t make any sense. But for some, it does. In fact, we had some clients who actually wanted to reset the content of their Joomla website, despite the potential SEO implications (which we communicate to our clients), but, when the client insists against our best judgement, we will eventually oblige and we delete all the articles off his Joomla website. Here’s how we do it:

  • We login to phpMyAdmin (usually from within cPanel), and then we select the database that powers the Joomla website.
  • We run the following queries (by clicking on the SQL tab on the top, pasting the queries, and then clicking on Go):

    DELETE FROM `#__content`;
    DELETE FROM `#__categories` WHERE `type` = 'com_content';
    DELETE FROM `#__assets` WHERE name LIKE 'com_content.category.%' OR name LIKE 'com_content.article.%';

    Note: You must replace #__ in the above queries to the database prefix of your Joomla website which can be found in the configuration.php file (it is the value of the variable $dbprefix).

  • Finally, you should optimize the tables (where you deleted the rows from) by issuing the following queries:

    OPTIMIZE TABLE `#__content`;
    OPTIMIZE TABLE `#__categories`;
    OPTIMIZE TABLE `#__assets`;

  • That’s it!

Again, we recommend you thoroughly think out your decision before deleting all the articles on your Joomla website. If your decision is irreversible and you really want to delete your content, then all you need to do is to execute the above queries. If you need help, then go ahead and contact us. Our work is efficient and professional, we are super dedicated to our customers, and we don’t charge much!

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