How to Convert Custom Post Types to Posts in WordPress?

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.

• FAQ – frequently asked questions
• Team members
• Knowledge base
• Portfolio
• Glossary
• Reviews
• Documentation
• Gallery
• Coupons

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.

• Switching theme – your old theme has custom post types that your new theme does not support. In this case, all custom content will show 404 page not found error when you switch to a new theme.
• Removing plugins – some custom post type plugins like glossary and reviews can add bloat your site easily and increase the page loading time. You may need to delete the plugin in order to improve the page loading speed.  
• Removing clutter – custom posts may add lot of menu items that you do not like and want to make your admin interface simple.
• Time saving – maintaining multiple custom post types consume lot of your time and you want to manage a simple workflow with standard posts.

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.

• Go to your site’s admin panel and navigate to “Plugins > Add New” section. Type “post type switcher” in the search box to find Post Type Switcher plugin.
• Click on “Install Now” and then “Activate” to install the plugin on your site.

• This plugin will add a box in the index pages to provide an option for conversion. Now, go to your custom post type index page in admin panel.
• Select the check box against the custom posts you want to convert and click on the “Bulk actions” dropdown.
• Choose “Edit” option and then click “Apply” button.

• You will see an additional option ‘Post Type” and click on that dropdown.
• Choose “Post” and click “Update” button.

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.