Axle Category & Tag Trash

Posts and pages go to the trash when you delete them. Categories and tags don’t: one click on “Delete” and the term is gone. WordPress also moves its posts to “Uncategorized”, moves its child categories up a level and removes it from your menus. Getting it back means restoring a database backup.

Axle Category & Tag Trash keeps every deleted term for 30 days (or 7, 90 or 365, your choice).

Undo appears the moment you delete a term, on the Categories, Tags or any other term screen, for single and bulk deletes. Restore later from Tools > Axle Category & Tag Trash puts back:

• the term itself, with the same ID, name, slug, description and parent,
• all of its term meta (colours, images, SEO fields stored by other plugins),
• every post it was assigned to, in the same order,
• its child terms, moved back underneath it,
• the menu links that pointed to it, in the same menu and position, with their sub-items,
• and it removes “Uncategorized” from posts that only got it because of the deletion.

Keeping the same ID matters: navigation blocks, widgets and shortcodes that point to the term by ID work again without editing them.

Works with categories, tags, WooCommerce product categories and attributes, and any custom taxonomy that has an admin screen.

Free and open source under the GPL. No pro version, no upsells, no ads in wp-admin, no tracking. And it stays that way.

Where to find it

• Tools > Axle Category & Tag Trash lists deleted terms with what they were attached to, who deleted them and when. Filter by taxonomy, search, restore or delete in bulk, see exactly which posts, child terms and menus a restore brings back, and empty the trash.
• Every category and tag screen has a link to it under the list.

WP-CLI

• wp axle-category-tag-trash list
• wp axle-category-tag-trash restore <id>...
• wp axle-category-tag-trash delete <id>... or wp axle-category-tag-trash delete --all

Try it before you install. try.axlewp.com/axle-category-tag-trash opens a private WordPress in your browser with this plugin and some demo content.

Part of Axle by AryanX, a family of free plugins for running WordPress sites safely.