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How to Delete a Site in WordPress

Delete WordPress Site

Decided to permanently remove your WordPress website from the Internet? Regardless of the reason, whether closing up shop for good or starting a new niche under that domain name, the solution seems easy. However, removing your site from the Internet isn’t an instantaneous process. It’s often cached by a WordPress plugin or a snapshot service such as Cloudflare. Google bots also store a copy to show to visitors until your site is back online. Furthermore, it may still appear in search results or be visited using a Wayback Machine. To ensure it is truly gone, here’s how to delete a site in WordPress.

Delete a site hosted via WordPress.com

This action is mandatory before you delete a WordPress.com account, which is usually when people seek the following steps. Be aware that you must cancel any pending or active purchases or upgrades beforehand. Got it? Here’s how to delete a WordPress.com-hosted site:

  1. Login to your account and tap on My Site in the top left corner.
  2. Make sure the right site is selected if you have multiple.
  3. Click on Manage to expand the list and select Settings.
  4. Click on the last option on the Settings page, titled Delete your site permanently.
    Optional. Click on Export Content if you want to create a backup.
  5. Click on the Delete Site button in the bottom left corner.
  6. Type your site URL and click Delete this Site to confirm.

Delete a self-hosted WordPress site permanently

If you are starting from scratch, continue without delay. But if you want to re-use your site files, use a backup plugin for WordPress beforehand. Alternatively, you can look for a Backup feature in the cPanel on your hosting website. With that said, here’s how to erase a self-hosted site using WordPress:

Option 1. Use your cPanel Auto Uninstaller

A quick and easy solution, but not always available. If you used a one-click WordPress installer feature with your hosting, here’s what to do:

  1. Login to the cPanel on your hosting website.
  2. Under Hosting, find an option titled Auto Installer.
    It might be titled differently, look around a bit.
  3. Under List of Installed Applications, find your website URL.
  4. Click on the Delete button next to it. It might also be a trashcan icon or an X.
  5. Confirm your decision and give it some time.
  6. The hosting should automatically take care of the follow-up steps. However, you can still go through them to double-check.

Option 2. Uninstall your WordPress site manually

Erasing the entire site comes down to using FTP to access your WordPress website. The method, whether through an FTP client or via the File Manager web app in your hosting’s cPanel, is irrelevant. We recommend the latter because it’s convenient for other steps. Here’s what to do:

  1. Find the root folder of your site. It’s usually titled public_html, www, or yoursitename.
  2. Open the wp-config.php.
  3. Remember the WordPress database name mentioned under single quotes.
    Clarification. Look for define (  'DB_NAME',  'database name'  );
  4. Exit the document, highlight all of the files in the root folder, and delete them.

Delete the WordPress MySQL database

Now that the core files are gone, your website shouldn’t be functional. However, a database containing tables of data, including user accounts, is still present. Here’s how to erase a WordPress database using cPanel:

  1. Navigate to the home page of your cPanel.
  2. Under Hosting > Databases, find an option titled MySQL Databases.
  3. Find the database name you noted above, highlight it, and click on the Delete button.

Edit your robots.txt file to prevent crawling

As mentioned, search engines will show your website in search results for a time after you wipe it clean. They also show a snapshot of the last time your site was online, leading visitors to expect it will be back online. Here’s how to block search engine crawlers from accessing any of the site URLs:

  1. In the now-empty root folder, create a new file and name it robots.txt.
  2. Right-click on it and select View/Edit.
  3. Add these two lines of code:
    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /
  4. Save the file.

Alter your .htaccess file to stop indexing

This is another measure that can speed things up. Here’s how to edit the .htaccess file to prevent search engines from indexing the site:

  1. Create a new file and name it .htaccess.
  2. Right-click on it and select View/Edit.
  3. There’s no need to use the default .htaccess file structure. Simply paste this code:
    Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow"
  4. Save changes.

Alternate method

Some people report having success with this method:

  1. Paste the following code in .htaccess instead of the one above:
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/robots.txt
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.websitename\.com$ [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [L,G]
  2. Replace websitename with your domain name.
  3. Save the file.

Optional. Delete the domain you used

Don’t do this if you plan on re-using the domain or if you paid good money for it. But if you decided to part ways with it, here’s how to erase the domain from your account.

  1. In cPanel, look for a section titled Domains.
  2. Click on an option titled Domains.
  3. Find the domain on the list, then click on the Manage button to the right of it.
  4. Scroll down to the second section, Remove the Domain, and click on the Remove Domain button.

Submit a request for site removal

The methods above should be sufficient. However, if you are determined to do everything at once and never look back, the following steps can speed things up. Here are three removal requests you can submit:

Google

Here’s how to ask Google to remove your website from its search engine results:

  1. Log in to your Google account with access to Google Console/Developer Tools and verified ownership.
  2. Navigate to the Remove outdated content page.
  3. Enter your full site URL, starting with HTTP or HTTPS.
  4. Click on the Request Removal button.
  5. If you get an error, read this troubleshooting guide.

Bing

Here’s what to do if you want to send a removal request to Bing:

  1. Make sure you’re logged into your Microsoft account.
  2. Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools.
  3. Visit the Content Removal Tool page.
  4. In the Content URL field, enter the complete site URL.
  5. Under Removal type make sure Remove page is checked.
  6. Click on Submit.

Wayback Machine

Wayback Machine has multiple ways to save a website. For the opposite action, we found sending an e-mail to Archive.org, the parent company works best. Describe your request and mention the site URL, and send the e-mail to info@archive.org. Follow further instructions if necessary.