How to Permanently Delete a WordPress Site from the Internet

Recently, one of our readers asked if it was possible to permanently delete a WordPress site from the internet? Simply deleting your WordPress installation does not completely remove it from the internet. In this article, we will show you how to permanently delete a WordPress site from internet.

When and Why Permanently Delete a 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.

Please note that this article is about deleting your self hosted WordPress.org website. See our guide on the difference between self hosted WordPress.org site vs WordPress.com blog.

If you want to delete a WordPress.com blog, then see this article on how to delete your WordPress.com blog.

Having said that, let’s take a look at how to properly and permanently delete a WordPress site from internet.

Permanently Deleting a WordPress Site from Internet

Here are the steps you can take to properly delete a WordPress site and make it difficult to find.

Step 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.

Step 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 do that by visiting your WordPress hosting account’s dashboard. Upon login, locate the File Manager icon.

File Manager provides a web based interface to manage files stored on your server. You need to go to the root directory and delete all files stored there.

You can also delete your WordPress files using an FTP client. If you are unfamiliar with FTP, then take a look at our beginner’s guide on using FTP.

Step 3: Block Search Engines Using Robots.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 cPanel 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.

Step 4: Removing Content From Search Engines

Even though your content does not exist any more, search engines may keep showing it for sometime.

Search engines understand that websites can go down due to technical faults. This is why they keep showing the content for a while hoping that your website will come back.

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.

Despite taking all the steps, this process can still take sometime. You can speed it up further by submitting cache removal request.

Removing Website Snapshots from Wayback Machine

Archive.org’s Wayback Machine is the world’s largest archive of websites. It crawls and stores cached versions of billions of web pages.

Anyone can visit Wayback Machine and look for cached snapshots of any website.

The best way to permanently remove your website from Wayback Machine is by contacting Archive.org and request them to remove snapshots of your content.

Removing your website from Wayback Machine by emailing Archive.org will ensure that your past snapshots are never included again.

Even when your domain registration is expired and transferred to a new owner, Archive.org will not enable archiving for that domain ever again.

That’s all, we hope this article helped you learn how to permanently delete a WordPress site from internet. In case you want to start a different website, check out our guide on how to start a WordPress blog for detailed instructions.

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The post How to Permanently Delete a WordPress Site from the Internet appeared first on WPBeginner.

How to Bulk Delete WordPress Users with Specific Roles

Do you want to delete WordPress users with specific roles? While you can go to the users page and delete each user one by one, it’s not a feasible option if you have a lot of users. In this article, we will show you how to bulk delete WordPress users with specific roles.

Method 1: Manually Deleting WordPress Users with Specific Roles

This method is simpler and does not require you to install any plugin.

Simply go to the Users page on in your WordPress admin area. You will notice the list of users registered on your WordPress site.

On top of the list, you will see the links to different user roles. When you click on a user role, it will show you the list of users with that specific user role.

This page only displays 20 users at a time. If you have more user accounts that you want to delete, then click on the Screen Options tab on the top right corner of the screen.

This will bring a fly-down menu where you can set the ‘Number of items per page’.

For example, we want to delete users with subscriber user role, and there are 144 users with that role. We will enter 144 in the number of items per page field.

Click on the ‘Apply’ button, and the page will reload showing all user accounts with the subscriber user role.

Now you need to click on the select all checkbox next to the Username column to select all items displayed on the page.

If you don’t want to delete some users, then you can uncheck them now.

Once you are ready, click on the ‘Bulk Actions’ menu and then select ‘Delete’. After that click on the Apply button and WordPress will delete all selected user accounts.

If the user accounts you are trying to delete have created posts, then you will be asked what you want to do with those posts.

You can select to delete all content created by those users or attribute it to an existing user account.

Click on the confirm deletion button to continue.

WordPress will now delete all selected users accounts from your site.

This method will work for a few hundred users, but if you have thousands of users, then you don’t want to adjust the screen options because it can potentially overload your server.

Instead you need to use Method #2.

Method 2: Bulk Delete WordPress Users with Specific Roles Using Plugin

The default way to bulk delete users with specific roles is quite simple. However, sometimes you may need to select users based on other criteria as well.

For example, you may want to delete users that haven’t logged in for a while, or users who signed up during a specific period of time.

In such a situation, the default user management tools will not be enough. Luckily, there are plugins that allow you to efficiently perform bulk tasks.

Let’s see how to delete users with specific roles using a plugin.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Bulk Delete plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit Bulk WP » Bulk Delete Users page.

Here you can select Bulk Delete options for deleting users. First, you can select the specific user roles. After that you can select the filtering options.

You can restrict bulk delete to users…

• Who have registered in a given number of days.


• Users who haven’t logged in the last __ of days.


• Only if user doesn’t have any post.


• Only delete first __ users.

You can also select users by meta data.

Scroll down a little to the ‘By User Meta’ box. In this box, you can select meta fields and use conditional operators to compare their values.

Click on the Bulk Delete button and the users matching the specific criteria will be deleted.

That’s all we hope this article helped you learn how to bulk delete WordPress users with specific roles. You may also want to see our list of 13 free user management plugins for WordPress.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

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