How do I remove or delete a WordPress installation?

If you’ve installed WordPress on your website, but then decide not to use it, you should delete the WordPress database to disable it and ensure that your site remains secure.

If you don’t delete the database and you leave a live copy of WordPress on your site without ever updating it, “hackers” could try to guess the WordPress password or take advantage of security bugs to do malicious things like sending spam in your name.

To delete the database:

  1. Login to the “My Account” control panel (having trouble?)
  2. Click MySQL Databases
  3. Locate the database you want to delete and click Delete.

That’s all you really need to do. You don’t need to uninstall any WordPress files if you don’t want to: they’re harmless and usually take up less than 1% of your site’s available file resources.

If you do want to remove the WordPress files simply for the sake of neatness, you can do so using our web file manager or an FTP program such as Cyberduck. You should delete the four files named index.php, license.txt, readme.html, and xmlrpc.php, plus all files and directories with names that begin with wp- (such as “wp-activate.php”, “wp-admin”, and so on).