I have a lot of ACF fields that I have “deleted” from the ACF interface, but after reading around these forums, it seems that some of the field information is left in the database.
Today I found a plugin here that claims to remove old names/keys. I tried it out on a staging site and it seems to clean up a lot of deleted fields, but before using on my live site (which is backed up) I wanted to know if you guys had any experience with these types of plugins? Do they indeed delete ALL traces of older field information? What are the risks using them? Is there a better way to go about doing this?
Would really appreciate an experts input.
Thanks.
Deleting ACF fields that are not longer used can be problematic. I do not have any experience with these plugins but I know where the problems can happen.
These plugins look at the field name or “meta_key”. The issue is that you might have multiple fields on different post type that have this same field name and this would mean that you’d delete content that you did not want to delete.
Unless you are sure that the field name is not used anywhere on the site I would not delete it. I, for one, know that I don’t always use unique field names.
