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How To Delete a WordPress Site?
You might feel the necessity to delete your WordPress website at some point as your business or blog may have changed track. What do you do in such a situation when it comes to deleting a WordPress site? Maybe you are not so sure how to do it or, perhaps, if to do it or not.
WordPress is a wonderful platform for strengthening your online appearance. It gives you the utmost freedom to explore your capabilities as a blog writer in creating your personal website. WordPress also respects your privacy and free will in case you want to remove your blog or site.
Times may appear when you have to remove blog posts or restart the entire website. Sometimes you even might think about deleting your website in critical circumstances. You might look for a solution and uninstall WordPress on your local PC. Sorry to say that uninstalling your WordPress application or server will not do the job.
That’s why we are here to help you. We can share a perfect and easy guideline that will lead you to your goal without a mess. Just keep reading this article and find out how easy it is to delete your WordPress site or blog permanently or temporarily, whichever suits you the best.
Why Would You Delete WordPress Site or Blog?
Blogging is no wonder a matter of joy and fun. Many people enjoy writing blogs and even reading them. These contain short but informative articles that could draw anyone’s attention. But a certain number of users have informed that blogging might draw unnecessary attention too.
This might cause a problem for some writers. Many writers write blogs anonymously to keep their identity hidden. Many write about controversial topics and might get in trouble or threats to remove them. Or sometimes you just find out that you wrote the wrong information about something and now you want to remove it.
Again, you might be changing your path of career or starting over your business. And now, you want to delete your previous WordPress website permanently and create a new one. Or you just want to restart your existing website. So, the bottom line is that there will be plenty of situations that you might face as a blogger or a website developer, which will be pushing you to delete your blog or site.
Delete Your WordPress Blog
You might have already decided to delete your blog. But before you do so, there are a few things that you should be aware of. In WordPress, there are two types of blogs. One is a self-hosted WordPress.org website, and the other is where the blogs are hosted on WordPress.com. The first one is the most commonly used blog for multiple reasons. Instead of deleting your blog, you can also switch from one platform to another if you want to.
Now, let’s focus on how to delete your WordPress blog. We are sharing a step by step tutorial for you so that you can understand it in the easiest way:
Step 1: Set a Backup
Yes, you read it right. The first thing you need to do is prepare a backup option for your blog before moving any step forward. It can be hard to realize now, but we are speaking from previous experiences. No matter how determined and sure you are, you might start regretting your decision just the next moment you have completed the job. So, creating a backup will assure you a second chance if you change your mind anytime in the future. You can restore your precious website whenever you want.
This sounds super easy, but unfortunately, it is not in real life. You are not provided with any single button to perform backing up or downloading all your data. So, you have to perform it manually. First, go to the WordPress dashboard and find Tools. Go to the Export section. You will find a sector that says All Content. But this button will not include your media files and uploads. It will export posts, tags, categories, comments, pages, etc. So, you have to on media and, therefore, download all your media files manually.
Step 2: Delete WordPress.com Blog
After you are done downloading your data and ensuring all files have their backups, you can now move ahead. The next step is to delete your blog. As you have already reached the dashboard, you will see the Delete Site button below the Tools section.
Click here, and they will be asking for your reason to delete the WordPress site. Click on Another reason if you want to continue deleting it. After that, a window will pop up. It will ask you if you have surely exported all your data for backup. This window is a warning that your site will be deleted permanently, and so you can’t use it again once you have deleted it.
If you are sure that you want to continue, then click on the Delete Now button. You will get a link or code for verification via email. Once you have verified that, your job is done. Your WordPress.com blog is now permanently deleted.
Step 3: Custom Domain
WordPress offers many unique features, and domains are one of them that keeps your blogs and pages organized. You can purchase domains as they suit you the best and also can look for free or by default ones. However, in case you have ever purchased one from WordPress.com, it might cause failure to your attempt to delete your WordPress.com blog.
Don’t worry. It doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to delete your site at all. But yes, this will take you to perform some extra works. If you are unable to delete your WordPress site at this moment, WordPress will notify you that you are using a custom domain and claim it to be the reason for not being able to delete the site. So, it would help if you fixed that first and then try again.
Your site requires to be active on WordPress.com to access the Domain Manager. You will have two choices to select from:
- The first option requires you to move the custom domain to a different registrar. Unfortunately, this can’t be done overnight. A few days will do the work. Different domain registrars have possibly unique instructions for you to follow.
- An alternative option to that is to make your WordPress.com blog private. This means your WordPress.com blog is visible only to you but nobody else. For this, go to the dashboard and find Settings. Find Reading Page and now keep scrolling down until you see the Site Visibility section. Here you will find the check box that says, ‘I want to make my site private…’. Tik mark that box, and you are done. Although this step will not delete your blog, it will not show publicly. Now, you have to wait till your domain registration reaches its expiry date, and then you are free to delete your website permanently. Just a reminder for you is that check if your domain is not set to an Auto Renew option in WordPress.com.
Delete a Self-Hosted WordPress.org Site
To be honest, this is a lot simpler way to delete your blog. WordPress.org offers users more freedom and a complete entry to their own data. That’s why it is easier to modify, change, or even delete whenever you want:
Step 1: Set a Backup
Again, before deleting anything, make sure you have a backup plan if you have any second thoughts. For instance, let’s presume that you will never even think about your blog or website after today. But what is worth this risk? Exactly, nothing.
Therefore, we highly recommend that you back up every data in your WordPress.org blog before deleting them.
Step 2: Delete WordPress Files
To delete your files, you have to do it manually.
- First, go to the cPanel dashboard
- Use your username and password to log in
- Find the File Manager and click on it
- Go to the WordPress root’s directories
- Mark all the files and folders and delete them
That’s all you need to do if you want to delete your self-hosted WordPress.org blog with success. Well, there is one job left. You still have to make sure that you unsubscribe your host or server.
How To Delete a WordPress Site? (Permanently Delete a WordPress Site)
The answer to this question is a bit tricky. You can delete all your wp files and make your website unavailable. But it might not be permanent. Removing every trace from the internet is quite challenging. You might be in many references and comparisons or statistics and still appear in many search results.
Here are the steps to follow if you want to delete your WordPress.org site permanently:
Step 1: Backup
Again, create a backup for your website. No matter how many times we say it, people tend to skip this step. But we recommend highly not to do that.
Step 2: Delete WordPress Files
Again, follow the steps stated earlier for how to delete your WordPress files. Simply go to File Manager and delete all of them.
Now, here is another tip. You can delete the files using an FTP client too.
Step 3: Block Search Engines with Robots.txt
This is a crucial part of making sure your website is removed permanently from everywhere. Robots.txt will be telling all the search engines that they are not allowed to crawl your website or web pages. Most of search engines respect robots.txt and follow its directions. Yet, some unpopular crawlers may attack.
To deal with them, create a new robots.txt file. You can use either FTP or cPanel file manager. After that, add the following lines:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
This will restrict all the user agents to crawl.
Step 4: Remove Content From Search Engine
Use the .htaccess file for this. Go to wp root’s directory and create a .htaccess file. Edit the file and insert the code:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/robots.txt
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ – [L,G]
Use your actual domain name, replacing the “domain.”
Step 5: Remove Snapshots
Try to contact Archive.org and request the removal of all your snapshots.
How To Delete a WordPress Site and Start Over?
Restarting your WordPress site involves having everything back to default settings. This will ensure that you have a fresh start by deleting every app and customization you ever made. So here is an easy outline for you to delete your WordPress site and start over.
- First, do not forget to backup your site.
- Install the WP Reset plugin. It comes in a free version.
- Activate it.
- Go to the Tools.
- Find WP Reset.
- Type in “Reset” in the box for confirmation.
- Click on Reset Site.
- Confirm again when a window pops up.
After the site restarts, you will notice a message from WP reset on your WordPress home page dashboard. This means you have successfully started over your WordPress site.
See also:
1- How To Completely Delete WordPress Site?
2- WordPress Delete Theme? (Easy way)
3- How To Delete WordPress Account? Complete Guide
Conclusion
If you want to delete your WordPress site or delete the WordPress blog, that is your decision. But make sure that you don’t rush into anything. These blogs and websites are made with a lot of effort and time. So, do not do anything that makes you regret your actions.
And again, you should remember that whether you permanently have deleted your site or not, it might be archived somewhere by Google. Google also keeps creating caches of your blogs and website that is preserved for a while as long as Google keeps it that way. Many projects can archive the web by identifying historical changes that occur via the website.
Many people suffer from uncalled attacks by spammers too. They can scrape your website or hack into it if your password isn’t strong enough. In that case, all your data are still out there under the supervision of the hacker. So, make sure to have a strong password and follow the guidelines as directed to permanently delete your WordPress site or if you need to start over.
