Refreshed the live WordPress draft/pending inventory on May 17, 2026. The queue was 80 draft/pending records before cleanup. Selected 15 low-risk clutter items for reversible cleanup: 9 exact-topic drafts already covered by published canonical URLs, 3 archive candidates, 1 AI Concierge test draft, and 2 weaker duplicate-draft copies where a better draft remains.
Moved the 15 selected items to WordPress Trash using WP-CLI, without force delete. Verified all selected IDs now have post_status=trash.
Trashed IDs: 62, 6978, 8144, 8291, 8875, 23545, 30762, 43526, 47706, 63895, 64240, 65339, 65522, 66129, 66740.
Current live draft/pending count after cleanup: 66 total, 38 pages and 28 posts, 0 pending-review.
Backup folder: /Users/samaguiar/Documents/Projects/admin/backups/wp-draft-clutter-cleanup-20260517-173119
Backups include cleanup-manifest.tsv, cleanup-ids.txt, wp_posts-before.tsv, wp_postmeta-before.tsv, verify-after-trash.tsv, wp-post-delete-output.txt, plus per-post JSON, HTML content, and postmeta JSON under the posts/ subfolder. Rollback can use WordPress Trash first, or the saved backups if needed.
Readiness workbook: /Users/samaguiar/Documents/Projects/outputs/wordpress-draft-readiness-2026-05-17/wordpress-draft-readiness-2026-05-17.xlsx
Overlap tiers workbook: /Users/samaguiar/Documents/Projects/outputs/wordpress-draft-readiness-2026-05-17/wordpress-draft-overlap-tiers-2026-05-17.xlsx
After cleanup tier counts: Tier 1 exact-live duplicates 0, Tier 2 cannibalizes live content 10, Tier 3 heavy QA 15, Tier 4 near ready 41, Tier 5 publish-now 0.
The collector initially missed one live draft because newline-heavy metadata broke TSV parsing. The script was patched to hex-encode text meta fields before parsing, then rerun. The refreshed workbook now matches the live SQL count of 66.
The requested clutter reduction is complete, verified live, backed up, and reflected in refreshed workbooks and the local QA queue.
Good continuation options are final QA for the 41 near-ready drafts, consolidation of the 10 remaining cannibalization-risk drafts, or a second cleanup pass on the 15 heavy-QA drafts. Keep the 15 trashed items in WordPress Trash for a short rollback window unless Sam approves permanent deletion.
Start from the May 17 workbooks and the backup folder above. Do not force-delete the trashed drafts unless explicitly approved. The collector and workbook scripts live in /Users/samaguiar/Documents/Projects/admin/scratch/wordpress-draft-readiness-2026-05-12 and now prefer SSH_PASS for Cloudways WP-CLI access. The collector also handles newline-heavy meta fields safely.