Creating a website on WordPress is often easy, but completely deleting a website is a lot more difficult. With the tips below you will also succeed in uninstalling and removing your WordPress website.
Warning: this article will delete everything on your WordPress website by emptying the server. This means you will lose all texts, images, pages, menus et cetera. Do you want to keep a copy of this? First, make a backup of your website.
Index
- What’s on my WordPress server?
- MySQL database
- Files on your server
- Deleting your MySQL database
- Deleting your files
What’s on my WordPress server?
In this article, we’ll learn how to delete everything from your WordPress server. For this, it is first useful to know what has been set up. These are two important parts: the MySQL database and all files
MySQL database
On this database you will find the .wp-config file. This keeps track of all texts, settings, themes, and plugins for your website. If you still want to keep it for reuse, for example, first make a backup of this data and then download it externally from your server.
Files on your server
As soon as you install WordPress, a number of files will immediately be placed on your server. These are called the ‘WordPress core files. These belong to the current version of WordPress at that time and are therefore very easy to download again from WordPress.org. It is therefore no problem for these files if you delete them; you downloaded them again.
In addition, under ‘Media’ you will find files of plugins, themes, images, and other files that you have uploaded yourself. If you want to delete them but don’t want to lose them, you should back them up as well. The easiest way to do this is via FTP.
You can find each file in a different place. They are usually stored in a folder called ‘uploads’, which you can find in the wp-content folder. This is categorized by the month or year of addition. In the diagram below you can see which file you can find where.
Media files /wp-content/uploads
Plugins /wp-content/plugins
Themes /wp-content/themes
Deleting your MySQL database
Now that you know which files are stored where on your server, we can move on to the next step: deleting them. So your database contains all the settings, page layouts, posts, and more parts of your website. Once you have deleted them, it is often very difficult to find them.
So think carefully about whether and which files you still want to keep and make a backup of them in good time. To delete your database, go to the control panel that you received from your web hosting party. Here you go to the MySQL management menu. In this folder, you will find a list of all databases. Select the database of your website here and choose ‘Delete’ at the bottom. You have now deleted your database.
You can find the correct database for your website by looking at the wp-config.php file. Look for the “define(DB_NAME)” line. After this code, you will find the name of your database that you need to remove to uninstall your website.
Deleting your files
Now that you have deleted the database, your website itself is offline. The files that have been on your website are still lying around on the server. To remove these you need an FTP client. Once you have downloaded and opened it, look for the ‘root’ of your website. it is often called ‘httpdocs’ or ‘public_html’.
If you installed WordPress in a different way, you may need to click a folder further to do this. To then delete all files, select everything from the correct folder.
If the selected folder still contains subfolders or files that you do not want to delete, deselect them first. Then press ‘Delete’ to delete all files.
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