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Delete All People permanently removes every person, household, and associated membership record from the Church Admin directory in a single operation. This is an irreversible action and should only be used when you are completely certain you want to wipe the directory.
Finding the screen
Go to Church Admin → People → Delete all. This screen is only accessible to WordPress site administrators — other user roles cannot see or use it.
What it deletes
When confirmed, the following are permanently deleted:
- Every person record in the directory
- Every household record
- All associated membership data — small group memberships, ministry assignments, class enrolments, and any other per-person metadata
The screen asks for confirmation before making any changes — click Yes, delete everyone to proceed.
What it does not delete
The following are not touched by this operation:
- WordPress user accounts — any login accounts linked to directory entries remain in WordPress. If you want to remove those too, do so separately in WordPress → Users.
- Small groups, ministries, and classes — the group and ministry structures themselves remain, just emptied of members
- Giving records, attendance records, and other module data — these tables are not truncated by this operation
When you might use this
- Test or demo sites — clearing out dummy data before importing your real congregation
- Starting over after a bad import — if a CSV import has gone badly wrong and the data is too corrupted to fix record by record, wiping and reimporting from a corrected file is sometimes the fastest recovery path
- Decommissioning a site — removing all personal data before closing down or handing over a church website, as part of GDPR data erasure obligations
Important warnings
- There is no undo. The database tables are truncated — not soft-deleted. Once confirmed there is no way to recover the data from within Church Admin.
- Back up first. Before using this screen on a live site, take a full database backup. Most web hosts provide a backup tool in their control panel, or you can use a WordPress backup plugin. If anything goes wrong, a backup is the only way to recover.
- WordPress user accounts are not deleted. If former members have login accounts, they will still be able to log in after this operation. Remove their accounts separately if needed.
- GDPR. If you are deleting data in response to subject access requests or right-to-erasure requests, note that this tool deletes everyone — it cannot be used to delete a single person’s data. For individual deletion, edit the person’s record directly and delete from there. See General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).