There may be a time in your blogging career when you want to close down your website or blog. Perhaps your business has closed, or you want to start a new website from scratch.
In fact, there can be numerous reasons which can trigger the closer of your self-hosted WordPress Blog.
Although it’s not a big deal to delete your website, it does require you to follow a specific and well-defined procedure for permanently deleting your WordPress Blog from the Internet.
So, if you have decided to delete your WordPress Blog from the Internet, then here is the post that will tell you how to delete a WordPress Blog.
You will come to know how to back up your site, delete your files, and remove your website from search engine results.
However, before we go on to describe the steps for deleting a WordPress Blog; let’s have a look at why you would like to delete your site in the first place.
Why would you want to delete your WordPress Blog?
There are many bloggers and webmasters out there who build a blog or website for a specific purpose. Moreover, in most of the cases, a blog or website serves a temporary purpose.
For example, they can use their blog as a marketing method for products or services. In such cases, a temporary site can quickly meet the objectives for which it was launched.
In fact, WordPress is a perfect platform for temporary websites as it can be erected and dismantled quickly. So, when a temporary site has run its course, it is perfectly alright to close down or delete such sites or blogs from the Internet.
In some cases, it might happen that you operated a blog and didn’t want to write for it anymore. It might be the case that you have blogged for a long time and don’t wish to continue and keep your site active.
You want to get rid of the responsibility of blogging and so have decided to delete your WordPress Blog completely. Perhaps you want to venture into another field so want to close down your blog forever.
In all of these cases, it is perfectly alright to delete the WordPress Blog. In fact, you can have a self-hosted WordPress blog or can use the WordPress.com platform.
Here, we will describe the techniques for deleting self-hosted WordPress Blog.
Steps to Delete WordPress Blog
Self-hosted WordPress Blogs are sites that you have on hosting accounts. So, it does not include the free blog system at WordPress.com.
For Self-hosted WordPress Blog, you have to use a web hosting provider and buy the domain name.
Here, we will describe a quick and easy way to delete your WordPress Blog. Thankfully, it does not involve a lot of steps and won’t take much of your time.
Here’s how to completely delete your WordPress website in three easy steps.
Step #1: Backing up your files
Before embarking on taking the drastic step of deleting your website, it’s always a good idea to create a backup of your website.
It might happen that you want to restore the site in future. In that case, you will need the content.
For backing up your WordPress files, you can either use hosting control panel like cPanel –> phpMyAdmin or else you can also use WordPress Backup Plugins.
There are many Backup Plugins available such as UpdraftPlus, or blogVault Real-time Backup. They help you to backup, restore, or migrate your website with quick restoration for files and databases and automatic scheduled backups.
Once you have backed up your site, you can go ahead and start the process of removing it.
Step #2: Deleting the files
Some Self-hosted WordPress users have the option to delete their files using their host’s cPanel. However, it is not a universal method and cannot be used by for all Self-hosted WordPress Sites.
An easy and more viable solution is to remove your site from a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Client such as Filezilla.
You need to login using the credentials of your hosting account. Then locate the domain you want to delete and go on to select all the files and folders associated with it.
Then right-click, select Delete, and confirm.
It is simple at that.
However, ensuring that your site is completely removed from the Internet, you need to go ahead with few more steps.
Step #3: Delete your WordPress Database
Although you have deleted your WordPress files, your database still exists and need to get rid off so as to leave you with no security related issues and vulnerabilities.
The simple way to delete your database is through cPanel.
So, you need to log into your host and navigate to access the cPanel.
Once you are there, go to the Database Tools Section and click on the MySQL Databases button:
Here, you get the list of your databases.
Simply select Delete for the relevant database.
Make sure that you have selected the correct database.
Finally, confirm the delete action by clicking the Delete Database.
You also need to delete any existing users.
So, access the MySQL Databases section.
Locate Current Users, and click Delete on each user.
Once this is done, your WordPress website will be fully deleted.
However, if you cannot access your cPanel, then you need to contact your hosting provider and request them to delete your database for you.
Step #4: Removing your Content from Search Engines
Although you have deleted your website, search engines can still display your web pages in search results.
Crawlers take some time for communicating to the search engines that your website does not exist anymore.
So, you can take the initiative and communicate to the search engines that you have already deleted your WordPress Site so your web pages need not be indexed.
You can submit a Removal Request asking a search engine to remove your web pages from their search results. As for Google, you can use its “dedicated tool.”
You have to enter the URL of the web page you wish to remove, and press the Request Removal button.
Another way to tell the search engines that you have deleted your WordPress blog or website is by setting up a redirect in your .htaccess file. It is a WordPress configuration file which can alter the behavior of your server.
For setting up a redirect, open the file and add the following code:
Header set X-Robots-Tag “noindex, nofollow”
This header tag will apply to all the web pages of your site, and prevent search engines from indexing your site.
Conclusion
As we have seen, deleting your WordPress Blog is simple and can be executed through an FTP Client or your host’s cPanel. In this article, we have described the easiest method for completely deleting your WordPress blog or site.
Let’s have a quick recap:
- Backup your website.
- Delete your website’s files.
- Delete your WordPress Database.
- Remove your content from search engines.
However, you should delete your WordPress Blog only when you are completely sure that you do not want to continue it any further.
We hope that you would have found this article, “How to delete a WordPress Blog” very useful.
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