Due to the easiness of installing plugins on WordPress, most of us end up installing a lot of useless plugins. To deactivate only is not the right solution to get rid of them, they can still slow down your WordPress Website. Read our take on Why you should delete inactive WordPress plugins immediately.
General Process of Deleting a WordPress Plugins –
Generally, you can delete a WordPress plugin from your admin panel in the following steps:
- Go to the inactive plugin.
- Click on Delete link below it.
- A warning message will appear asking whether you want to want to delete the associated files with this plugin. You should check this.
- Once you click OK, the plugin and its files will be deleted.
How to check if the WordPress plugin is removed completely ?
Some plugin doesn’t just insert files in your website but also inserts tables in your database. You got to check both to make sure the plugin is removed properly.
Checking Files – Plugin files are found in the wp-content/plugins/plugin-name folder. Check that no folder exists with the plugin’s name.
Check Database – Access your database using phpMyAdmin or any other relevant tool available on your server. If a plugin inserts a table in the database, their names will have a specific prefix. Like the names of the tables inserted by Yoast SEO plugins are prefixed as generalPrefix_yoast_seo. With this, you can easily identify the tables respective to any plugins. If there are such tables, you will need to remove them.
Removing A WordPress Plugin Completely –
It involves 2 steps in removing a WordPress Plugin completely from a website :
Deletion of Files – It usually happens when you delete the plugin from the admin panel itself. Some residual files may remain sometimes which you have to remove manually from the FTP account or cPanel’s file manager. These will be found at wp-content/plugins/plugin name. Delete this folder manually. To be on the safer side take backup of your website before deleting.
Deletion of Tables – Tables inserted by the plugin will not be deleted when you delete the plugin from the admin panel, you always have to do this manually. You should remove these tables as well to remove the plugin completely. It can be removed quite easily from the phpMyadmin or equivalent tools. Just to be on the safer side, you should take a backup of your database before deleting any table.
