“I don’t want my wordpress site anymore. I want to delete it, is it possible?” We got asked from 1 reader that want to delete his wordpress site. Is it possible to delete the wordpress site? How to permanently delete WordPress site from Internet?
Sometimes you may need to completely remove a WordPress site from the internet. You can simply delete WordPress files from your server, and it will become unavailable.
However, your site may still appear in search results, cached snapshots, and the Wayback Machine.
It is quite difficult to remove all traces of a website from the internet. There are thousands of websites that aggregate content from other sites, publish screenshots, offer statistics and comparisons.
With the steps highlighted in this article, you can make it difficult to find your deleted website, and its content.
In this article, we will give short tutorial about how to remove your wordpress site from internet.
Delete Your WordPress Site from Internet
Here are steps by steps to delete your WordPress site:
1. Backup Your WordPress Site
First thing you need to do is to create a complete backup of your WordPress site. Even though you want to delete your site completely, you should still make a backup.
This will come in handy in case you change your mind in the future, or want to access piece of content that you had already deleted
2. Delete Your WordPress Files
Now you need to delete WordPress files stored on your server. Deleting these files will erase WordPress software as well as your themes, plugins, images and other media files. You can go via control panel –> file Manager. Or you can FTP to your root folder and then remove all your files.
3. Important to Block Search Engines Using Robot.txt
Now that you have deleted your website, it is time to block search engines from crawling your website.
We will use robots.txt file to tell search engines that we don’t want our pages to be crawled.
Remember, that robots.txt file is just a directive. It is respected by most search engines, but some lesser known crawlers may completely ignore it. Don’t worry we will show you how to deal with those as well.
First you will need to create a new robots.txt file using file manager in control panel or FTP.
After creating the file you need to edit it and add the following lines:
User-agent: * Disallow: /
These two lines disallow all user-agents (crawlers like Googlebot) from accessing all URLs under your domain name.
4. Remove All Content from Search Engines
Even though you have deleted all your files from the server, the search engine will still sometimes show your result on Internet.
You will need to explicitly tell search engines that your content is no longer available, and it is removed permanently.
The easiest way to do this is by using the .htaccess file. You will need to create a new file in your website’s root directory and name it .htaccess.
Next, you need to edit the .htaccess file and add this code inside it:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/robots.txt
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [L,G]Don’t forget to replace example.com with your own domain name.
This code will redirect all requests to your website and show 410 Error. However, it will allow crawlers to access your robots.txt file.
Yeap, that’s only simple tutorial from us and hope you enjoy it. If you like this article, you can share it.
Thank you!
