Erase Personal Data for entire Site (staging)

  • I’m trying to find a way on my STAGING site to erase all personal data fairly simply.

    What I’ve tried:

    1) The wordpress Erase Personal Data feature – only one email address at a time, I have over 4,000 users

    2) “WP Bulk Delete” and “Bulk Delete” plugins – can only delete about a 100 at a time then times out, and I would also have to delete 5000 woocommerce orders which have customer data. Painfully slow, would probably take me 5-8 hours at least every time I push a new staging. Their support while nice hasn’t been able to help.

    3) Paying webadmin to delete relevant databases – expensive and surprisingly not a matter of just deleting a couple databases, there has to be finagling or other things break. This is my fallback for urgent staging site needs, but not one I can rely on regularly.

    4) Setting role permissions to hide users and orders where my personal data is – doesn’t work for my use case.

    5) Searching this forum and plugins for ideas. Haven’t found anything addressing this specifically.

    I’d love to have the Erase personal data for whole site (except user role admin), instead of the single email address at a time. That’s my feature request.

    Or if someone knows of a plugin that would do the same thing for not a tiny site I would love to know. I’ve never had any luck finding one that can process a big site.

    • This topic was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by Steven Stern (sterndata).
    • This topic was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Moved to Fixing WordPress, this is not an Everything else WordPress topic
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  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    It sounds like you’re cloning an existing site as a staging site, but need to remove all PII. Just how much of the existing site do you really need for staging? What if you only exported what you really need, like existing pages, and created the rest, such as users, from scratch? Once you have a clean, functional staging site, export that data so you can reuse it on any new staging site. Import any relevant data, such as pages, from the production site on top of the base staging data.

    Thread Starter eftcolumbus

    (@eftcolumbus)

    Sorry for delay I didn’t get a notification that I got a response.

    I need the whole site functionality, it’s primarily for when a plugin isn’t acting as expected and the plugin author/tech support needs to figure out what the problem is.

    I have 50 plus plugins, I don’t know how many snippets, child theme, I think it would take a long time to create all the functionality and then import pages/products.

    And if it’s not exactly like my live site, then their testing could/would be useless.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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