Someday you might want to delete WordPress site and account entirely from the internet for some reason. Simply deleting WordPress files from your server would make it unavailable. Even then, search results, cached screenshots, and the Wayback Machine can still display your site.
Getting rid of any signs of a website from the internet is a difficult task. Thousands of websites aggregate content from other websites, post screenshots and provide data and comparisons. You can make no trace of your deleted website and its material by following the steps outlined in this post.
In this article, you will understand how to delete the WordPress website permanently.
When to delete your WordPress website
It might be that your company is closing or merging with another, that you’re relocating your website to a new domain or beginning from scratch, or that you’ve abandoned a personal project. It’s possible that you’ll need to delete a WordPress site or self-hosted WordPress site entirely from the internet at some point.
Deleting WordPress files from your server will make them inaccessible. However, search results, cached snapshots, and the Wayback Machine may still show your site. Permanently removing your website entails exactly how much you could believe. It involves deleting all of your material from the internet and ensuring that your website is inaccessible from any source.
Removing all traces of a website from the internet is a challenging task. Thousands of websites gather material from other websites, post screenshots, and provide statistics and comparisons.
You may make it difficult to discover your erased website and its content by following the instructions outlined in this article.
Before Deleting WordPress Site Create a Backup
Always save a backup of your site as your first move to delete WordPress site, which extends to several other items you might do with WordPress. While attempting to uninstall the specific website, you can never be certain that you will not use any of the data later or regret the deletion. Check this article on how to back up a WordPress website if you don’t know how to do it.
Now, you need to stop searching Engines so that they won’t be able to crawl your website before you delete WordPress site. We will cover this in the later section of this article.
You have uninstalled all of a website’s files, databases, and domain, search engines can still keep track of it. Search engines will still list your website in relevant searches even if it is hidden from bots. You need to ensure that this does not happen and specifically inform search engines that your website is being permanently taken down. If you uninstall the site, it can still be found in relevant searches by a search engine.
They do this under the presumption that your website is down for a short time and will be back up and running soon. By modifying the robots.txt file, you can make your website invisible to search engines. This file acts as a reference for search engines crawling and indexing the files on your blog. You will tell the crawlers not to index the website by using these directives. stopping search engines from crawling and indexing is the second option when you delete WordPress site.
Delete WordPress blog or account hosted on wordpress.com
It may appear that deleting a WordPress site is a simple yet tedious task, but this is necessary for you to remove your website. Depending on how you use WordPress, there are a few different ways to remove a website.
Case I: Deleting your blog via the dashboard on wordpress.com
You can delete a WordPress.com blog simply from the dashboard.
- First, log in to the dashboard.
- Click on Settings in the dashboard, and the settings menu page will open.
- Scroll down, and you will find the button that says” Delete Site” and click on that.
- Once you click on the “Delete Site” option, you must enter your blog password. Confirm the deletion by providing your password, and your WordPress.com site will be deleted.
Once you have done that, you can’t undo what you’ve done. Clicking “Delete Site” will erase all content from the WordPress.com site, including any domain references.
Case II: Deleting a WordPress blog site with upgrades and purchases made
If you haven’t upgraded your website, the procedure above will work properly.
Follow the steps below if you have paid for more storage or a domain name, or you may have utilized a premium theme. If you’ve done any of these things, you’ll be prompted to cancel any purchased upgrades before your site is deleted. That isn’t an issue at all. Simply follow these steps:
- In the popup informing you to cancel your premium upgrades, click Manage purchases.
- Cancel or transfer all of your purchased upgrades after being routed to the Purchases section; this will cancel the WordPress subscription.
- Restart the procedure outlined in Case 1. This time it should go off without a problem.
WordPress.com website account deletion
To prevent making irreversible blunders, pay great attention to the following steps on how to delete a WordPress account if you’ve made up your mind and are completely aware of your decision.
Please remember, you may recover access to your WordPress account within 30 days of removing it, just like you can to your website.
Deleting your user-id implies removing all of your WordPress.com-hosted websites.
Here’s how to close a WordPress.com account.
- To display your profile, go to your WordPress.com dashboard and click on your avatar in the upper right column.
- Select Account Settings from the drop-down menu.
- Go down to the bottom of the page & click Permanently close your account.
Still, are you certain about the results? You may change your username or delete a site without having to close your WordPress.com account. So, before you delete one of your sites, all of your sites, or your account, think carefully.
Retrieving WordPress Account and website After deletion
You can restore your website if you change your mind about removing it for whatever reason.
This may be done within thirty days of the website being deleted if it is hosted on wordpress.com. You will, however, need to contact their customer service to get the website restored for you.
Do contact WordPress customer support right once if you find you accidentally closed your site. During this 30-day period, they will be able to assist you with recovering your site. All of your site’s data is purged and cannot be recovered after 30 days, and the site URL is erased and cannot be used again.
You may restore your self-hosted website manually, and there is no time restriction on how long it takes once it has been deleted. All you have to do now is restore your previous backup. You can also contact your hosting provider and ask them to restore the deleted website.
Deleting self-hosted WordPress website
A website created with WordPress software and hosted with any third-party hosting company, meaning it is not hosted on wordpress.com, can be deleted in four simple steps. By deleting the website’s files, database, domain name, and by making a sure copy of your website pages that are saved on third-party websites or search engines, you will effectively erase all traces of the website.
It’s a good practice to stop Search Engines from crawling your website a few days before you delete your website files, database, and domain.
Note: if you want also want to delete traces of your website go through Permanently deleting WordPress website traces from the internet section later in this article.
Phase I – Delete WordPress site via Cpanel.
A self-hosted website’s files can be deleted using either cPanel’s File Manager or an FTP client. Here’s how to delete WordPress site from cpanel:
- To accomplish this using cPanel, go to your hosting account and log in to your cPanel dashboard. Then select File Manager from the drop-down menu.
- Now, navigate to the public HTML directory in the File Manager. If you have many websites hosted on this account, the public HTML directory will have multiple folders. If this is the case, go to the folder for the website you want to remove and delete all of the files within.
- To delete website files using an FTP client, log in to the server using your FTP credentials and go to the public HTML directory once. Delete all of the files contained in the website’s folder.
Phase II – Deleting Website Database
The database is the most important portion of a website, and it must be removed as well if the website is to be completely wiped. To do so, go back to the cPanel dashboard and choose MySQL Databases from the drop-down menu.
You have to scroll down to see a list of databases on your server. A link to delete the database is located to the right of each of the rows displaying the database’s name. Only use the URL for the database you want to delete.
If this option is not present, you will need to contact your hosting provider for guidance on removing the database.
Phase III – Deleting the website’s domain name.
Someone might want to buy your domain name, and you may no longer require it. In this scenario, it may be preferable to erase the domain name, as well as the website’s files and database.
To do so, go to your cPanel dashboard and select Domains from the drop-down menu.
You’ll get a list of all domains registered to that account once you are in. When you’ve found the one you want to get rid of, click the Manage button on the right-hand side of the row.
You’ll be taken to a screen where you may edit the domain’s root directory and, below that, you can remove the selected domain by clicking the Remove Domain button.
Phase IV- Permanently deleting WordPress website traces from the internet
Thousands of websites gather content from other websites, publish screenshots, and provide statistics and comparisons.
It would be best if you made it difficult to discover your deleted website and its content by following the methods below.
Removing Content From Search Engines
You may have pages on your website or the entire website that you don’t want search engines to index. If your website is down, eventually, down the timeline, search engines will stop showing your website. However, the search engine will be able to show the indexed copy of your website pages for some time.
To check whether or not your web pages are indexed in search engines, you can just type in “site://yourwebsite.com” in the search box. it will show how many pages are indexed particular search engine. Trying it on google will show how many pages of a particular website are indexed.
If there are no results, you can delete your website with the above steps. If there are results, you would need to follow any of the steps below to stop search engines from saving your website pages.
If you don’t want to wait too long, you can stop search engines from crawling your website in a short amount of time in three ways. Keep in mind; it is a good practice to remove website traces from search engines before website deletion. So, use one or a combination of 2 or more ways described below before you start to delete website files and databases, and the domain of your website.
1. Using robots.txt
A robots.txt file is a simple text file that can be generated with any text editor, such as notepad, and saved with the .txt extension, which can be used to block your whole website or specific pages from search engines crawl.
Your public HTML directory on Cpanel may already have the robots.txt (before deletion of the website). If you have already deleted all the files in your Cpanel, you can still use this process. All you need to do is to create and upload a robots.txt file. But before you revoke domain and hosting.
If you have a robot.txt file replace the content of this file with the following code; if not, create one with the following code to deny bots from an entire website:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
It is advised to do this before a week or two to stop search engines from crawling your website or letting them know you don’t want them to show the content. After making sure your website pages are not indexed anymore, you can proceed to delete the website.
2. Using .htaccess file
Despite the fact that your website is hidden from bots, search engines will still list it in relevant searches. To absolutely avoid this from happening and to specifically warn search engines that your website is being shut down permanently, you’ll need to change the .htaccess file as well.
In the root directory (public_html folder), update the .htaccess file by adding the following code to it before proceeding with deletion of the website and wait till the pages are removed from search engines. If you have already deleted the files, you would need to create a new .htaccess file with the following code in it, in the root directory, and wait for a while before deleting the domain.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/robots.txt
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [L,G]
Note: Remember to replace your own domain name instead of example.com.
Both requests will be redirected to your website, and a 410 Error will be shown. Crawlers will, however, be able to view the robots.txt file.
Even if you follow all of the steps, the procedure will also take some time. You can speed things up even further by submitting cache removal. This can be done, for example, directly through Google. In the case of Google, you may go to their Remove expired content page. You will be able to enter the URL of the website that you have removed as well as the content that you no longer wish to be displayed.
3. Google Search Console Removals
For this login into your search console -> select your website property ->> click on Removals on the left side>> select NEW REQUEST and add the URLs you want to remove.
4. By using the setting on the WordPress dashboard
Alternatively, you can go to the admin dashboard of your WordPress site and follow the steps below. But you need to perform this step before you delete your files and databases.
- Step I: Login to the WordPress dashboard.
- Step II: Look for settings on the left side of the menu.
- Step III: Click on reading, and a new window will open under Reading.
- Step IV: Scroll down you will see a check box with the text “ Discourage Search Engine from indexing this site” Click the checkbox and hit save.
This inbuilt feature of WordPress allows you to communicate with search engines to stop crawling your website.
Remove Cached Snapshots from Wayback Machine
You’ll need to uninstall the cached snapshots of your website from the Wayback Machine if you want to wipe the traces of the previous state of your website. The Wayback Machine is a database that stores cached copies of any of the websites that have ever been available online.
The only way to erase cached screenshots from the Wayback Machine is to email Archive.org to insist that the images be removed. And if your domain registration expires and has been passed to a new owner, Archive.org will not enable you to archive that domain.
Restoring Self-hosted WordPress Website
You may restore your self-hosted website manually, and there is no time restriction on how long it takes once it has been deleted. All you have to do now is restore your previous backup. You can also contact your hosting provider and ask them to restore the deleted website.
Wrapping Up
Blog websites and hosted websites have different ways of deleting. There might be strong reasons that you want to delete your website for that, we touched on a few of them in this post, but no matter what your reason is, the processes mentioned are the same for everyone. So, if you want to completely delete WordPress site from the internet, follow the instructions described in this post. Moreover, you now know how to remove all of your site’s remnants.
Given the suggestions above, we hope that removing all traces of your website will be a lot easier and simpler for you. Now, you can delete WordPress site and start over.