How to bulk delete (or clean up) blog posts in HubSpot

If you've just completed a content audit and have a spreadsheet full of blog posts to remove, you're probably wondering if there's a faster way than opening every article individually.

The good news is that HubSpot does support bulk actions. From the blog dashboard, you can bulk unpublish, archive, or delete blog posts.

The bad news? The bulk action isn't the hard part.

The real challenge is finding and selecting the right articles, especially if you're working with hundreds of blog posts.

We recently ran into this exact situation after migrating a client's 20-year-old website to HubSpot. The site had around 400 blog articles, and after a thorough content audit, we decided to remove roughly half of them.

Here's what we learned.

Why we removed 200 blog posts

This wasn't a case of deleting content simply because it was old.

The website had been around for more than 15 years, and many of the earliest blog posts had been published during the site's first few years. They were short, outdated, and no longer reflected the quality of content the client wanted to publish.

Before deleting anything, we reviewed every article and asked a few simple questions:

• Does it receive organic traffic?
• Does it rank for keywords?
• Does it have backlinks?
• Does it provide value to users?
• Does it support our current content strategy?

If the answer to all of those questions was no, it became a candidate for removal.

By the end of the audit, we had identified around 200 articles that no longer deserved a place on the website.

How we identified which articles to remove

This was by far the most important part of the project.

We used Screaming Frog and connected it to:

• Google Analytics 4
• Google Search Console
• Ahrefs

Instead of checking three different platforms for every blog post, we exported one spreadsheet containing all of the metrics we needed.

For every article, we could quickly see:

• Organic traffic
• Keyword rankings
• Backlinks
• User engagement

Having everything in one report saved an incredible amount of time and made it much easier to make informed decisions.

HubSpot's bulk actions aren't the problem

When people search for "bulk delete blog posts in HubSpot," they often assume the platform doesn't support bulk actions.

That's not quite true.

From the blog dashboard, HubSpot lets you select multiple posts and:

• Unpublish them
• Archive them
• Delete them

The problem is getting to that point.

If you've already completed a content audit in Screaming Frog, Excel, or another SEO tool, HubSpot doesn't provide a way to import that list or automatically select matching blog posts.

Instead, you have to find each article yourself before you can include it in a bulk action.

For a large cleanup project, that's where most of the time is spent.

HubSpot lets you bulk unpublish, archive, and delete blog posts after you've selected them. The challenge is locating and selecting the right articles when you're cleaning up a large blog.

The workflow we used

After completing the content audit, the actual cleanup only took about a day.

Here's the process we followed.

1. Export your list of articles

Keep a spreadsheet containing every article you plan to remove.

This becomes your checklist throughout the cleanup and helps ensure nothing gets missed.

2. Search for each article in HubSpot

Rather than scrolling through hundreds of blog posts, use the Search content box to locate each article by title.

Once you've found the article:

• Click Actions next to the blog post.
• Select Unpublishing options.
• Click Unpublish.
• Confirm the action.

Repeat this process for every article on your spreadsheet.

Using the search box was much faster than manually browsing through hundreds of blog posts.

3. Archive the unpublished articles in bulk

Once we'd worked through the entire list and unpublished every article, we filtered the blog dashboard to show Draft posts.

From there, we selected all of the unpublished articles and archived them in bulk.

Although HubSpot allows you to archive published posts directly, we preferred to unpublish first. It gave us one last opportunity to verify everything before moving the articles out of our active content library.

4. Archive instead of deleting

We chose to archive the posts rather than permanently delete them.

Why?

Because archived posts can still be accessed if someone ever needs an article from years ago.

Deleting content permanently removes that safety net.

For us, archiving was the better long-term option.

What about redirects?

One of the biggest questions during a content cleanup is whether every deleted article should be redirected.

Our answer was no.

Most of the removed blog posts were left as 404 pages, which aligns with Google's guidance when a page no longer has a relevant replacement.

If an article had a newer version covering the same topic, we would have redirected it to that page.

What we deliberately avoided was redirecting everything to the homepage. That doesn't help users find the information they were looking for, and it isn't considered a best practice by Google.

HubSpot updated the sitemap automatically

One thing that pleasantly surprised us was how quickly HubSpot handled the sitemap.

Within about a day, the archived blog posts had been removed from the XML sitemap automatically.

There was nothing we needed to regenerate or update manually.

Lessons learned

Looking back, the hardest part wasn't deleting 200 blog posts. It was deciding which 200 to remove.

A proper content audit made the cleanup much easier and ensured we weren't deleting pages that still had SEO value.

If you're planning a similar project, here's what I'd recommend:

• Audit every article before making a decision.
• Use Screaming Frog with Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs integrations to review traffic, rankings, and backlinks in one place.
• Keep a spreadsheet of every article you're removing.
• Use HubSpot's search box to quickly find articles instead of scrolling through your entire blog.
• Archive content if you think you might need to reference it in the future.
• Only use redirects when there's a genuinely relevant replacement page.
• Don't redirect every deleted article to your homepage. If a page no longer has a suitable replacement, it's perfectly acceptable to let it return a 404. Redirecting unrelated content to the homepage isn't recommended by Google and can create a poor experience for users.

Cleaning up a large blog can feel overwhelming, but once you've completed the content audit, the actual work in HubSpot is relatively straightforward. The biggest time saver isn't a hidden HubSpot feature. It's having a clear plan, a well-organized spreadsheet, and a repeatable process before you start making changes.