Recently, one of our readers asked if it was possible to remove a WordPress website from the Internet.

Deleting your WordPress installation does not completely remove your website from the internet.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to permanently delete a WordPress website from the internet.

But before you start, take the time to take a look at How to install a WordPress theme, How many plugins to install on WordPress.

Then find out together our list.

When and why remove an internet website?

Sometimes you will have to delete a website. You can simply delete the WordPress files from your serverand he will be unavailable.

However, your website may still appear in the results of search engine and in the cache from some snapshots.

It is quite difficult to remove all traces of a website on the Internet. There are thousands of websites that aggregate content from other websites, post screenshots and offer statistics and comparisons.

With the steps proposed in this tutorial, you will be able to make it difficult to access the content of your website.

Please note that this tutorial is about removing a self-hosted WordPress website.

With that said, let's take a look at how to properly and permanently remove a WordPress website from the Internet.

1 Step: Backing Up Your WordPress Website

The first thing you need to do is to create a full backup of your WordPress website. Even if you want to completely delete your website, you still need to make a backup.

This will be useful in case you change your mind in the future, or if you want to access some of the deleted content.

Step 2: Delete your WordPress files

Now you need to delete the WordPress files stored on your server. Deleting these files erases the wordpress software as well as your themes, plugins, images and other media files.

You can do this by visiting your cPanel, in the file manager. If you are on OVH, you can use its module manager to delete WordPress as well as its database.

The file manager provides a web-based interface for managing files stored on your server. You must go to the root directory and delete all the files stored there.

You can also delete your WordPress files using an FTP client. If you are not familiar with FTP then take a look at our beginner's guide to using FTP.. 

Step 3: Block Search Engines With Robots.txt File

Now that you've deleted your website, it's time to block search engines from blowing up your website.

We will use the file " robots.txt To tell search engines that we do not want our pages to be scanned.

Remember, this file " robots.txt Is just a directive. It is respected by most search engines, but some lesser known robots can completely ignore it. Do not worry, we will show you how to deal with these.

If you want to go further, discover How to optimize your WordPress file Robots.txt for SEO

Let's go back to our tutorial.

First you will need to create a new file " robots.txt Using the file manager in cPanel or via FTP.

After creating the file you need to edit and add the following lines:

User-agent: * Disallow: /

These two lines prohibit any robot from accessing all URLs in your domain.

Step 4: Remove Content from Search Engines

Even if your content no longer exists, search engines may continue to display it for a period of time.

Search engines understand that some websites have small technical issues. This is the reason why they keep showing the content for a while hoping that your website is available again.

Go further by consulting How to improve search on WordPress: The best search plugins

But, you will need to explicitly tell search engines that your content is no longer available, and that it is permanently deleted.

The best way to do this is to use the "..htaccess ". You will need to create a new file in the directory and name it "..htaccess At the root of your website.

If you've never worked with this file, see How to find the ".htaccess" file on WordPress

Then you need to edit the "..htaccess And add this code inside:

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.

This code will redirect all requests to your website and display a 410 error. However, it will allow bots to access your robots.txt file.

Despite all the steps, this process can still take a while. You will have to arm yourself with patience.

It may also happen that you need to optimize the SEO from your website instead of deleting it.

Recommended Resources

Discover other recommended resources that will help you solve optimization and performance problems of your website. 

• How to Add Featured Images in WordPress
• How to Automatically Post to Facebook from WordPress
• Why do you have to start optimizing your WordPress blog by images
• Some tips to speed up the performance of your WordPress blog
• How to clean the cache of your WordPress blog

Conclusion

Here is ! That's it for this tutorial. I hope it will allow you to effectively erase the content of a website on the Internet. Do not hesitate to share it with your friends on your Social Media preferred. 

However, you will also be able to consult our resources, if you need more elements to carry out your projects of creation of Internet sites, by consulting our guide on the WordPress blog creation.

But, in the meantime, leave us your Comments and suggestions in the dedicated section.

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