In this article, you will learn how to delete WordPress plugins via FTP, this is very useful once some plugins can shut your site down so it’ll be impossible to delete the plugin in the normal way, inside of your WordPress dashboard, so, follow this to delete the problematic plugin and make your site comes back.
How To Delete WordPress Plugins?
WordPress is undeniably the leading or the best CMS out there. Like blogger WordPress lets you change themes of your choice and add widgets that are relevant to your needs.
WordPress is no longer solely from blogging anymore, it has various plugins that enable you to do ask much as you want on the web from building a magazine, e-commerce, booking system, directories, and much more.
Some WordPress plugins let you optimize your website with its functionality and performance such examples are lazy-loading of images, optimization plugins for search engines, security plugins, and many more. In this article, you’ll learn how to delete WordPress plugins via file manager or FTP.
Modern webmasters are overwhelmed with many useful plugins they can put on their sites. Sometimes downloading and installing these plugins from various developers would cause errors that could compromise the whole website due to incompatibility.
These incompatibilities might be through codes, databases, and performing the same functionality. When I say compromised, this would mean that your whole website will be offline from a couple of hours to days. This error may cause you to lose money and customers.
Now to prevent this status from being “offline”. If your installed plugins suffer from incompatibilities then you should decide at that very moment which of them should be retained. Moreover, one should be deactivated. Let’s say for example your site has been down already for a significant time, and you can’t log in to your website to uninstall that plugin that caused the error. This tut will let you deactivate or delete a WordPress plugin not from the using the administration board but through your FTP.
Delete WordPress Plugins Via File Manager
Each host dashboard has its own account page design, however, in most of it, the process is almost the same. You’ll log in, find the ‘file manager button, which can be under some ‘advanced’ tab to open the cPanel. Like this screenshot below.
Firstly, log in to your hosting provider and access our FTP, specifically on the file manager. On your file manager, you have to go to the directory where you installed WordPress. Look for the folder named “wp-content“. Access the folder the go to the next step to delete WordPress plugins.
Inside the WP-Content Folder
If you are inside the WP-Content folder, look for another folder named “plugins”.
Deleting a Plugin Inside the “plugins” Directory
Inside the “plugins” folder you can see many folders. Those folders represent the plugins that you installed or downloaded on your website.
Look for the folder name that represents your incompatible plugin. Then you can uninstall it by renaming and deleting the folder on your current directory.
Now the advantage of just renaming the folder name instead of deleting it. As a result, it enables you to still access stored data from that plugin for usage.
That’s pretty much it and thanks for reading! Leave your feedback and share your own experiences when you delete WordPress plugins.
SSH
- Connect to your server via SSH.
- Navigate to the root folder of your website.
- Use the cd command to navigate to the /wp-content folder.
- cd wp-content
- Rename the /plugin folder using the mv command.
- mv plugin.disable
- All your plugins will now be disabled.
Alternatively, navigate to the /plugins folder and rename the plugins individually to disable them individually.
In Conclusion
Now you can trigger plugins that no longer work. After all, you are the boss. Note that disabling it is not the end of the story. But now that you know, if you have any other questions or concerns, use the comments section below and we’ll get back to you with the answers!
