How to Fully Uninstall a WordPress Plugin?
In WordPress after the installation, usually one of the first things everyone does is install the plugins. But after sometime when your site grows and you understand which plugins are useful or not.
For that reason, you simply uninstall or remove it right? That’s totally wrong, it can influence the site’s performance by leaving behind tables and rows in your database.
Most of the cases, WordPress enables you to uninstall plugins in a matter of minutes. Further, there are some plugins that store files, folder, database and even shortcodes in your WordPress. So, to remove these unwanted files and shortcodes here are the different methods.
1. Simply from the Dashboard of your WordPress.
2. Remove extra shortcode associated with the plugin pages.
3. Removing Extra Files Added by a WordPress Plugin.
4. Using phpMyAdmin, Drop Unwanted Tables from your database.
Method 1) How to Uninstall a WordPress Plugin
1. Go to the Dashboard and select Plugins from menu.
2. When the plugins page open, you’ll see the list of all plugins that you have installed on your WordPress site
3. Then Deactivate the plugin which you want to delete.
4. After that ignore the activated plugins, edit buttons and press Delete.
Method 2) Removing Unused Shortcodes Associated with the Uninstall Plugins
Many plugins use shortcodes to your post and pages to add their functionality. As a result, when you uninstall a plugin, shortcodes visible in your posts as shown: [pluginshortcode]
Simply for disable this shortcode, add the below code to the theme’s function.php file. But always replace plugin shortcode with the shortcode tag used by that plugin you want to uninstall.
add_shortcode( 'pluginshortcode', '__return_false');
Note: Besides that, if you want to use that plugin again then remove this shortcode from the file.
Method 3) Removing Extra Files Added by a WordPress Plugin
There are some plugins that stores files in the plugins folder after their activation. But, files remain undeleted even when a plugin is uninstalled. So follow the below steps:
1. Firstly, connect to your WordPress site via FTP.
2. Browse to your /wp-content/plugins/ folder. Then delete the plugin folder from your server.
Method 4) Removing the Extra Tables from the Database by phpMyadmin
Some of the plugins after the activation creates the tables in the WordPress database. These tables load the extra data on your site and increasing the storage space.
Note: You can delete these tables by phpMyadmin. But before deleting the tables always backup your data.
1. Login into cPanel and click on phpMyadmin.
2. Then click on the database and select extra tables which you want to delete.
3. Below the tables list, you will see a drop-down With Selected.
4. Under this select Drop.
5. At last, click on Yes to confirm the delete action.
That’s all, we hope this article helped you to know how to fully uninstall a WordPress plugin.
