How To Completely Delete WordPress Site? There are many reasons to delete your WordPress site such as your business has been closed. Although relatively easy to achieve, immediate and permanent removal of the Internet requires some additional steps.
you can easily delete WordPress files from your server and they will no longer be available. But, your site may still appear in search results, cached snapshots, and the Wayback Machine. It is quite difficult to remove all traces of an Internet site.
There are thousands of websites that summarize content from other sites, publish screenshots, and provide statistics and comparisons. In this article, we will discuss how to permanently remove a WordPress site from the Internet. Let’s start!
Contents
Permanently remove a WordPress site from the internet
Backing up the site Before you do something as drastic as deleting the site, it’s always a good idea to create a backup. No matter how safe you are right now, you may need to access it in the future, even if it only serves as a reference source. Although there are many backup plugins, our recommendation is UpDraftPlus.
Delete files from your site using an FTP client
client
- While some self-hosted WordPress users can delete their files through the cPanel of their host, others do not have this option.
- The simple solution method is to delete the site via a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client.
- The one we recommend is FileZilla.
- If you are not already using FTP with FTP, you should keep up with a good tutorial before proceeding.
- Once you are logged in with the credentials found in your hosting account, locate the domain you want to delete and simply select all the folders and files associated with it:
- then right-click, select Delete and confirm:
- Although this step is very simple, making sure your site is completely off the Internet is somewhat more complex.
Delete your WordPress database via
- Although deleting files from your website will effectively close the site, your database will still exist, and this could leave you with security vulnerabilities.
- The easiest way to drop your database is through cPanel, and each host varies in its deployment, although the basic functionality is the same.
- First, log in to your host and navigate to your cPanel:
- Scroll to the Database Tools section there and click the MySQL Databases button:
- here is a list of your databases – just select Delete for the right database:
- Finally, check the correct database and confirm your selection by clicking Delete Database
Remove content from search engines
Even if you deleted your site, search engines can still display your web pages in search results. Search engine crawlers (also known as spiders, robots, or bots) like Google and Bing regularly access websites and index their content. Once the site is deleted, crawlers will take some time to communicate with the search engine that no longer exists.
How to delete Snapshots of the Wayback Machine Website
Archive.org’s Wayback machine is the largest archive of websites in the world. Drag and store cached versions of billions of web pages. Anyone can visit Wayback Machine and search for cached snapshots from any website.
The best way to permanently delete your Wayback Machine site is to contact Archive.org and ask them to delete snapshots of your content. Removing your Wayback Machine website by email from Archive.org ensures that your previous snapshots are never taken again.
Even if your domain registration has expired and transferred to a new owner, Archive.org will never enable archiving for that domain again.
That’s why we discussed how to permanently delete your WordPress site, whether you have created your site through WordPress.com or WordPress.org.
And if you get involved and created several WordPress.com sites, I will also show you how to delete all these sites at once by canceling your WordPress account. We hope that this article has helped you permanently remove a WordPress site from the Internet.
See also:
1- How To Delete a WordPress Site? (Easy way)
2- WordPress Delete Theme? (Easy way)
3- How To Delete WordPress Account? Complete Guide