WordPress Posts Can't Be Deleted (Move to Trash) Solution

WordPress is an excellent Content Management System, but over long-term use, strange errors occasionally occur, such as the “delete post (move to trash) function disappearing” bug and its fix introduced today.

Today, while editing a post on the site, I suddenly discovered that even as an administrator I didn’t have permission to delete posts. The move-to-trash buttons for posts had all disappeared, but Media and Pages still displayed and worked normally. Most site functions were also normal; only the delete function under each post was gone.

Although the “Bulk actions” on the post page still showed the move-to-trash option, once I tried to delete a post, I only got a “You are not allowed to delete this post” error message.

The site database may, due to hacker attacks, poorly installed plugins, automatic repairs, or even manual modification of database content, suffer data errors or loss, which can cause this kind of problem.

The solution steps you can take at this point are as follows; you can test them one by one, including:

1. Deactivate all plugins and third-party themes.

2. Add another account with the highest management authority and log in again with that account.

3. Install a user permission management plugin (for example: User Role Editor), manually adjust administrator permissions, or restore WordPress’s default permissions with one click.

Note that point three above may cause some plugins to fail to inherit permissions after the permission reset, and thus not work properly. In that case, simply remove that plugin and re-download and install it to rebuild the management permissions and restore normal functionality.