Unable to Remove Demo Content X Pro

[HeleneKrothe]

Howdy!

Recently migrated a site from one host to another, and found a couple of errors - the option to turn off the demo content cannot be found under “Validation”, and attempts to either shift from “published” to “draft” or trash the content all together produces an error in the UI. The status of the demo content cannot be changed in any way.

The demo content is unfortunately live and producing SEO errors. We’re unable to effectively market until we can remove the content in full.

Please advise.

[prakash_s]

Hello, @HeleneKrothe,

Thanks for writing to us.

The demo and demo content is there to make the website development faster. You can edit each page content, page name, image and text etc as per your design with your website content. If any page or any specific page section you don’t want then you need to remove it or delete it. Regretfully there is no option to remove the dome content or demo pages at the moment.

Thanks for understanding

[HeleneKrothe]

Hi Prakash,

Thank you very much for replying. What’s unfortunate is that while the demo content is intended to accelerate development, you ignored the ask about how to remove it once development is complete.

To reiterate - post or page demo content cannot be deleted, or moreover the status changed from “published” to “draft”. This is a bug, and given how it’s impacting marketing and general SEO I’m regretfully lost on why the demo content cannot be removed. Said content has been indexed, has nothing at all to do with the business, and needs to be deleted.

Please be clear about what we need to “understand” about static content that should be part of the dev process, and removed once the site is published. If one cannot remove the demo content at all, or easily mitigate its propagation to major search engines, what is the attraction to your theme? Seems shortsighted given your marketing.

If there is no means of removing the content and reversing the damage it’s done, please advise as to a refund process.

[alexander]

Hi @HeleneKrothe,

You can just delete any posts or pages you don’t want like you would anything else in WordPress. There isn’t an option to turn it “off” because it’s not a binary feature that can be disabled. There’s nothing special about the demo imported content, they are just normal WordPress posts and pages. You should be able to fully delete them or update the status to stop it from being published.

What error are you getting when you try to modify them? This isn’t normal behavior and we should try to figure out what’s going on there.

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Regarding SEO and indexing: The Demo Content is meant to be used as a starting point during development before a site is pushed live. If you’re working under a staging or local development environment indexing isn’t an issue, but if you happen to be working on the primary domain you can prevent the site from being indexed until it is complete. WordPress has an option under Settings > Reading called “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” which can be utilized.

[HeleneKrothe]

Hi @alexander,

The error specifically is that “There was an error moving the item to the trash”. Regular WordPress error screen. Modifying the demo posts, pages, or portfolios and then attempting to delete them doesn’t work either. We receive the “There was an error…” message in the UI regardless. We see this error when changing status as well, meaning that the demo content can’t be made draft, pending review, or private.

Update: We have disabled all plugins, as well as switched the theme to see if either would at all change the behavior. Neither works, and we see the same error(s) as noted above. When attempting to modify the demo content and press “update”, the content does not update and remains static.

Thank you for your words regarding SEO. This is unfortunately a live site that was moved from one host to another, and it was recently recognized that the demo content hadn’t been removed when the site originally went live. We have checked both versions of the site, and the error appears in both - the demo content cannot be deleted. This is a business that relies on being found via search, so we can’t accept your suggestion of modifying the robots.txt to discourage indexing.

[ruenel]

Hey Helene,

To better assist you with your issue, kindly provide us access to your site so that we can check your settings and investigate the issue further. Please create a secure note with the following info:
– Link to your site
– WP login URL
– WP username
– WP password
– WP Administrator Role
- Confirmation that we can access and make changes to your site
​
To know how to create a secure note, please check this out: How The Forum Works

Regards.