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How to Uninstall a WordPress Plugin

With over 50,000 WordPress plugins in the repository alone, it’s more than likely that you’ll be trying out and comparing several different plugins to accomplish tasks or solve problems on your site. When you’re done with one, you simply uninstall it by deactivating and deleting it, right? Wrong, the problem with doing it this way is that it can leave behind tables and rows in your WordPress database , and over time this can add up very quickly, which in turn can affect your website’s performance and even cost you money in disk space. Today we’re going to show you some tips on how to properly uninstall a WordPress plugin to ensure your database stays small and lean .

  • How to Uninstall a WordPress Plugin from the Dashboard
  • How to Uninstall a WordPress Plugin via FTP
  • The Big Problem When Uninstalling WordPress Plugins
  • How to Uninstall a WordPress Plugin (The Right Way)
  • How to Clean Up Left Behind Tables Manually

How to Uninstall a WordPress Plugin from the Dashboard

Before we get into how to uninstall a WordPress plugin properly, let’s first look at the typical ways users remove plugins in WordPress. The first is australia email list simply from the dashboard. Follow the steps below to uninstall a WordPress plugin the normal WordPress Plugin way (without data extraction).

Step 1

Go to “Plugins” in your dashboard and click “Deactivate” next to the plugin. In this example, we are going to uninstall the Wordfence security plugin.

Step 2

The last step is to click “Delete”.

How to Uninstall a WordPress Plugin via FTP

The second method that users use to uninstall a plugin is via FTP (without data extraction). Follow th

Pretty simple right? So, in most cases, the how to uninstall a wordPress plugin above methods are the wrong way to uninstall plugins, especially if you aren’t going to use the plugin again.

The Big Problem When Uninstalling WordPress Plugins

Whenever you install a WordPress plugin burkina faso business directory or theme, it stores data in the database. The problem is that when you remove a plugin using one of the simple methods shown above, it usually leaves behind tables and rows in the database. Over time this can add up to a lot of data and even start to slow down your site. In our example, we uninstalled the Wordfence security plugin, and that left 24 tables in our database (as shown below).

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