How to Permanently Delete a WordPress Site From the Internet

Deleting your WordPress site‘s files and database will take it offline, but you may still want to completely remove all traces of the site from the internet. Here‘s how to permanently delete a WordPress site.

Reasons to Permanently Delete a Site

There are a few reasons why someone may want to completely delete their WordPress site and wipe it off the face of the internet:

• Closing down a business – If you are closing up shop, you likely won‘t want your old site hanging around. Deleting it completely gives a clear signal.

• Removing controversial content – If your site hosted content you no longer want public, deleting it fully prevents access to the controversial material.

• Privacy concerns – For personal sites and blogs, deleting completely can help protect your privacy and prevent unwanted access to your info.

• Start fresh – Sometimes it‘s liberating to completely wipe the slate clean for a fresh start with a new site.

Step 1: Create a Full Backup

Before deleting your WordPress site, it‘s highly recommended to create a full backup of all files and the database:

Having this backup makes it easy to restore your site if you ever change your mind. It also preserves copies of things like images and content.

Use a plugin like UpdraftPlus to backup everything before proceeding.

Step 2: Delete WordPress Files

Deleting the actual WordPress files and database will take your site offline. This can be done a couple different ways:

Using cPanel

Log in to your hosting account‘s cPanel and navigate to File Manager. Delete all files and folders inside the /public_html/ or /www/ directories.

Using FTP

Connect to your site via FTP and delete all files and folders inside the /public_html/ or /www/ directories.

This will remove WordPress core, your themes, plugins, uploads – everything making the site run.

Step 3: Block Crawling with robots.txt

The next step is to block search engine crawlers from indexing your deleted site using a robots.txt file.

Create a robots.txt file in the root directory with this content:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This tells all crawlers like Googlebot to not crawl or index any part of the site.

Step 4: Return Server Error Codes

Even after deleting your site, search engines may still have it cached in their indexes. You need to explicitly signal that the site is permanently gone.

The best way to do this is using a .htaccess file to return server error codes:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/robots.txt
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [L,R=410]

This returns a 410 Gone error for all requests except robots.txt. 410 errors signal that the content is permanently removed, as opposed to a temporary 404 error.

Step 5: Remove from Search Engine Indexes

The previous steps will prevent new content from being indexed, but old cached versions may still show up in search results.

To expedite removal, you can take a few additional steps:

• Submit removal request – Use Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to directly request removal of your site.

• Update sitemaps – Upload empty sitemap files to remove all URLs.

• Add meta tags – Use <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> to prevent crawling.

This signals to search engines that they should purge all old content from their indexes. But it still takes some time to be fully removed.

Step 6: Remove Archived Snapshots

Archive sites like Wayback Machine take periodic snapshots of sites over time. Even if your live site is deleted, these archived copies still exist.

To remove your site‘s archived snapshots:

• Submit removal requests to Wayback Machine and Archive.today.

• For Wayback Machine, email [email protected] and ask for your archives to be removed.

Removing archived snapshots makes it much harder to uncover your deleted content.

Final Thoughts

Permanently deleting a WordPress site takes some effort but using this process will minimize the online footprint. Keep in mind it can be impossible to remove 100% of copies and discussions.

After deleting the site, it‘s recommended to let social media accounts naturally expire rather than pointing them to the deleted domain. Avoid linking to or promoting the deleted site as well.

With a thoughtful deletion process, you can fully take down a WordPress site while protecting your interests and privacy.