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How to properly uninstall WordPress plugins manually

Are you observing slow performance in your WordPress website? Is it because of too many plugins. Learn how to uninstall WordPress plugins manually in no time.

Wordpress plugins

Are you observing slow performance in your WordPress website? Is it because of too many plugins. Learn how to uninstall WordPress plugins manually in no time.


When you install WordPress, normally, one of the first thing you do is install plugins. As a beginner, you probably installed a lot of unnecessary plugins without checking which one is better for your website. The sooner you realize, you can optimize your WordPress a lot better. However, it is essential to properly uninstall and delete the plugins to ensure they do not interfere with the current functionalities of your website.

In this tutorial, I am going to show you how you can properly uninstall WordPress plugin and explain how it is important for your website.

Why Do You Need to Remove Them?

No doubt, one can find thousands of different plugins that they can download and use it on their website. They are mostly small applications you add to your website to give it more functionality and characteristics. The developers also make sure that they always update and secure their plugins from vulnerabilities and their tools keep providing you the functionality they promise.

This means that any plugin that you are not utilizing on your website can be at a potential risk.

Aside from vulnerabilities, the more plugins you have on your site, the greater your backups will be. This may not sound like a huge issue, but when you do create backups, it will take a ton of your time. Also, when you restore these backups, it is quite a tiringly long procedure.

The Difference Between Inactive and Uninstalled Plugins

Many users fall into the habit of navigating to the plugin page and disabling plugins that they don’t wish to use.

While deactivating a plugin is not a bad practice. However, it is necessary that you should uninstall it if you don’t plan to use it.

The difference between the two is simple; deactivating just deactivates the plugin, and it sticks around on the off chance that it’s needed again; while uninstalling the plugin will remove it from the dashboard entirely and will no longer consume any part on your website affecting its performance.

Wordpress-plugin

Uninstalling Plugins: The Primary Procedure

To uninstall a plugin from your WordPress website, follow these steps:

  • Navigate to Plugins >> Installed Plugins. After page opens, all of your plugins will be listed there;
  • Locate the plugin that you want to uninstall.
  • Click the Deactivate link  located under the plugin title.
  • Select the delete link under the plugin title.

Wordpress plugin

WordPress will confirm if you really want to delete, and you already know the answer to that.

Delete wordpress plugin

Removing Extra Files Added by a WordPress Plugin

In most cases, plugins that have been removed leave behind files that were put away outside the plugin folder. All things considered, you can complete the job through an FTP customer. To do that, connect your site to the FTP client and go to /wp-content/folder.

Wordpress plugin files

From this folder, you can delete those files and ensure the plugins have been expelled from your site with finesse.

Getting Rid of Unused Shortcodes

There are many plugins that make use of shortcodes in variable posts and pages. Once you deactivate or uninstall a plugin, those shortcodes will start to show up on your posts, and your post looks quite ugly.

To disable the shortcodes, you have to add this code to the theme’s functions.php file:

add_shortcode( 'pluginshortcode', '__return_false' );

Keep in mind; this code must be removed; else, you won’t have the capacity to utilize that plugin again, not even if you reinstall it.

Cleaning up WordPress Database

Some plugins make tables in the WordPress database. If these tables have too many information in them, then that would increase your WordPress backup size.

Use PHPMyAdmin to delete these tables. Take care, however, because doing it can affect the WordPress database.

Log in to the cPanel, go the database section, then look for the phpMyadmin icon.

Access-detail-wordpress

When you have launched PHPMyAdmin, go to the database administrator and select the tables you need to remove. Select the table and just click to the “Drop” button.

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Final Words

That’s all there is to it. I hope you have no issues while Uninstalling WordPress Plugin Manually. Was this tutorial has proved to be of help? If you have any query or suggestion about this tutorial, you can leave a comment below!

Meanwhile, you can also check out How To Create A Multilingual WordPress Site By Using WPML.

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Saud Razzak is the WordPress Community Manager at Cloudways - A Managed WordPress Hosting Platform. Saud is responsible for creating a buzz, spread the knowledge, educate the people about WordPress in the WordPress Community around the globe. In his free time, he likes to play cricket and learn new things on the Internet. You can contact him via email at m.saud(at)cloudways.com

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