Display Options

Navigate to WP Stories > Settings > Displaying Options to configure story expiry and automatic cleanup.

Enable Story Expiry

Toggle this on to make stories automatically disappear after a set number of days. When disabled, stories remain visible indefinitely.

Set Visibility Duration

When story expiry is enabled, this field defines how many days stories remain visible. After the specified number of days, stories are hidden from the feed but not deleted from the database.

For example, setting this to 1 makes stories expire after 24 hours (similar to Instagram Stories), while 7 keeps them visible for a full week.

Stories and Attachment Deletion

These settings permanently delete expired stories and their media. Deleted stories do not go to the trash and cannot be recovered.

Read this before updating an existing site to 2.4.2. Automatic deletion never actually ran in earlier versions - a bug meant the routine exited before doing anything. If you have had this setting switched on, your stories were never deleted, so simply fixing the bug would have removed everything past your retention period on the very first run.

So after updating, deletion is paused. You will see a notice on the dashboard telling you how many stories are affected and how old they are. Nothing is deleted until you open this tab and save it. Fresh installs are not affected.

Schedule Automatic Deletion

Permanently deletes stories once they have expired and the grace period below has passed.

Only expired stories are ever eligible. If Story Expiry is off, nothing expires, so nothing is deleted - the tab shows a notice saying so. If you want automatic cleanup, turn Story Expiry on first.

Delete After Expiry

How many days to keep a story after it expires, before deleting it for good. Default 7.

The field shows the resulting total age, so you can see exactly when a story is removed. With Story Expiry at 1 day and this at 7, a story is hidden after 1 day and deleted after 8.

Before 2.4.2 this was fixed at 7 days and could only be changed in code.

Delete Story Attachments

Also deletes the media uploaded with a story when that story is deleted.

Only files uploaded through the story submission form are removed. Images picked from the Media Library are never deleted, because they may be used elsewhere on your site. In practice this means member-submitted story media is cleaned up, while media on admin-created Stories and Story Collections is left alone.

How the three settings work together

Story Expiry	Schedule Automatic Deletion	Result
Off	Off	Stories stay visible forever.
Off	On	Stories stay visible forever. Nothing is deleted - nothing has expired.
On	Off	Stories hide after the expiry window, but stay in the database.
On	On	Stories hide after the expiry window, then are permanently deleted once Delete After Expiry has also passed.

Cleanup runs once a day on WordPress cron, in batches, so a large archive does not exhaust memory. Whatever is left over is picked up on the next run.