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.
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 They were short, outdated, and no longer reflected the quality of content the client wanted to publish.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:
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.
This was by far the most important part of the project.
We used Screaming Frog and connected it to:
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:
Having everything in one report saved an incredible amount of time and made it much easier to make informed decisions.
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:
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.
After completing the content audit, the actual cleanup only took about a day.
Here's the process we followed.
Keep a spreadsheet containing every article you plan to remove.
This becomes your checklist throughout the cleanup and helps ensure nothing gets missed.
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:
Repeat this process for every article on your spreadsheet.
Using the search box was much faster than manually browsing through hundreds of blog posts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.