How can i remove plugins

Astute Graphics. How do I deactivate or uninstall my legacy plugins? About deactivating plugins Deactivating is ideal for transferring your license to another machine.

Some deactivating examples: You have 3 machines and you want to use your plugin on the 3rd computer for a short time. About uninstalling plugins Uninstalling allows you to clean your instances of Illustrator of associated plugins. You are selling or discarding your computer. You have expired the trial period and chosen not to purchase. How to uninstall legacy plugins To uninstall your plugin, first ensure that you have quit Illustrator, then run the legacy installer.

Knowledgebase Article , views tags: deactivate disable plugins security themes wordpress. Install Plugins These steps will help you install and select a WordPress plugin for your blog.

You can search for a plug. Getting Started Article , views tags: blog install link plugin wordpress. Knowledgebase Article , views tags: cache wordpress. This article explains how to deactivate, change or delete themes and plugins on a WordPress site without the dashboard. Knowledgebase Article , views tags: access dashboard deactivate disable plugin plugins theme themes wordpress. WP Super Cache Plugin. Our updated 'Rock' user interface offers a fresh new look, along with several useful tools and helpful features.

One such feature is the My Sites tab, where you can easily manage your websites. And besides the database, a lot of plugins also leave behind additional folders and files. In our experience, this is commonly seen with security and caching plugins which create additional directories for logging.

If you have been uninstalling plugins using the simple methods above, unfortunately, there is probably a lot of clean up that needs to be done on your WordPress site.

Remember that deactivating a plugin only makes it inactive. How many inactive plugins do you currently have on your site? You should think about completely removing inactive plugins as they can still introduce security risks, even if not running, and simply leave bloat in your database. Well, in fact, they do. The first reason is that a lot of WordPress users bounce between plugins frequently, and by leaving the tables and rows behind in your database, this retains your settings.

This means that you can reinstall the plugin at a later time and all your data will still be there. But if for some reason you think you might return to a plugin later on, then yes, simply deleting the plugin using one of the above methods is the best route. But imagine a site over the course of 10 years, having used hundreds of plugins, that have generated possibly thousands of rows or tables.

Generally, a well-written plugin should only query the tables or rows in which it is tied to, however, this is not always the case. And then there is the issue of disk space. Most web hosts charge by the amount of disk space you use or have limits in place, and that includes your database. The WordPress plugin handbook is made for developers along with best practices on how to deactivate a plugin vs uninstalling a plugin remove data.

Even it says:. Less experienced developers sometimes make the mistake of using the deactivation hook for this purpose. If this mistake is made by the developer it means when the uninstall should have removed all of the data, it simply ran the deactivation process, leaving everything behind. Kevin Muldoon, an internet marketer and blogger, recently touched on this very subject in his post on why WordPress.

In an ideal world, when you go to uninstall a WordPress plugin, it should prompt you with three different options. But that is not quite how things work yet. It would be nice to eventually see something like this required in the repository. In this example, we are going to continue using the Wordfence plugin. One of the troubles with uninstalling a WordPress plugin the proper way is that each developer treats this a little differently. You can see an example of this below with the popular Gravity Forms plugin.

Here is another example on the Polylang multilingual plugin. It has to simply be enabled first. Weirdly enough Wordfence recommends you install another plugin, the Wordfence Assistant , which will help completely remove the plugin, data, and settings.

As you can see below, once the plugin is installed there are options to delete the Wordfence data and tables, clear all locked out IPs, and live traffic data. Other WordPress plugins might require an even more complex uninstall process, such as WooCommerce , in which you have to put the following code in your wp-config.

But this is why it is important before you simply deactivate and delete a plugin, that you ensure you are doing it in the most efficient manner. Here are shortcuts to uninstall guides for some popular WordPress plugins that some people sometimes have issues with:. If you are using a plugin that utilizes shortcodes and you delete and or remove that plugin, your site could look really weird until you replace them.

If you want to temporarily disable the shortcodes from the old plugin, simply use the following code in your functions. This will disable them from showing altogether. But remember, if you want to use them with the original plugin again, you would need to remove the code. There will probably be times in which you have already uninstalled a plugin and you are simply needing to do a cleanup.

There are a couple ways you can approach this, one is by using a table cleanup plugin, and the other is to remove the tables directly within phpMyAdmin. In both of these approaches, we highly recommend that you take a WordPress site backup beforehand. If you are a Kinsta user you can easily create a backup in the MyKinsta dashboard with one-click. Or utilize one of many popular WordPress backup plugins.

Your best option for a plugin is probably the Advanced Database Cleaner. This is a premium plugin, but it can scan your WordPress installation and allow you to delete orphaned tables.

You can also cleanup the tables manually in phpMyAdmin. We actually prefer this method over using a plugin. A lot of plugins will name their tables something similar to the name of their plugin. In this example, we are going to completely remove Yoast SEO according to their documentation. In their documentation that they state:.