How to Delete a WordPress Theme The Right Way
When you visit the “Plugins” and “Themes” section of your WordPress website, what do you see? Just as I suspected, there is a festival going on there – crowded and chaotic!
Don’t feel bad, the best of us tend to let things get a little messy now and then. With the awesome content you are producing, who can blame you for letting this get a little out of hand?
But it comes a time when you need to tidy up and introduce some freshness and cleanness to your website. Let’s shift our focus towards the themes you want to eradicate.
If you have too many themes and plugins, the update notices are popping up all of the time. Plus, they can compromise the performance of your website.
So where do you start? How to remove old themes successfully and make sure everything is truly gone? There are a few methods to get it done so let’s comb through them to see how it should be performed.
Delete Your Theme Folder
Firstly, you can remove it from your WordPress’ dashboard. You can’t remove the theme if you are using it at the moment, so you need to deactivate it first.
- Go over to the “Appearance” tab followed by “Themes”.
- Click “Deactivate”.
- Give that desired theme a click to proceed into the details section.
- Click “Delete”.
With that click the theme removal process is finished.
Another method of removing an installed theme is through FTP manager (File Transfer Protocol – an internet service for receiving or sending files between your computer and a web server/another computer).
Log into your server and proceed towards the WordPress installation folder. Then, scroll until you find the wp-content/themes folder where you need to remove the theme's folders.
Delete Other Theme Assets
Although the theme has been deleted and it’s not present in your dashboard anymore, there may be some trails that it left behind, such as images, widgets, menus, some posts or pages.
These may be hiding across different areas that need to be located and removed by hand. If you don’t feel like hunting through and locating all of those particles, I’m pretty sure that I’m very close to the truth. If that is the case indeed, I’m glad to inform you that there is another method available.
By using the WP Reset plugin, not only do you remove the theme and all of its components from the database, but get a few more handy assets that will have your back when needed the most. Are you familiar with the reset process of WordPress? If not, let’s go through it for you to get the general idea behind this functionality.
You reset a website when you want to remove all of the websites components, files and databases to get to its original state. There are a few methods of performing this maneuver, but the one done by hand is way too complicated and exhausting. Removing the databases, creating new ones, adding users, browsing through folders and directories, coding…the entire process could drag on for hours, but if you do it with a plugin, it takes in only a few minutes and only a few buttons pressed.
Resetting a website comes in handy in quite a few different scenarios. Sometimes you need to start from scratch, you maybe want to test something out, you need to restore your site from a backup, rebuilding your website and so on, and especially in this instance, to entirely remove certain components such as themes or plugins. This sounds like a very delicate procedure, bu this plugin is carefully assembled and allows you to have an easy experience. It requires literally two steps:
- Create a snapshot
- Press the reset button and confirm
And just like that, the entire process is over. Creating a snapshot is very important since there is no “undo” button – when you reset you won’t be able to bring it back. Making a backup as well is always a good option since the snapshot preserves the WordPress database only. But, if you want to remove a theme only, you want to exploit the partial reset tools and select the themes section only which will remove all options for all themes, leaving you with nothing but freshness.
The same goes for plugins, transients, uploads, custom tables, .htaccess files…everything is customizable and ready to be manipulated to your will. One Click Site Reset, WP-CLI Compatible, In-house Support, Post-Reset Setup, Database Snapshots, Database Diff Viewer, Selective Reset Tools, Webhooks Integration, Plugins & Themes Collections, Nuclear Reset, Emergency Recovery Script, Change WP Version…the features keep piling up.
Ensuring you have complete control over the process, reset the exact parts of the website you want, integrated with other services with multiple mechanisms of security to ensure you never accidentally reset your website and so much more, neatly packed in one ultimate tool.
With its massive functionality and unreal versatility, no wonder it’s called a “WordPress development tool for non-developers”, and that it gathered a family of over 200,000 satisfied users. To follow it up with a touch of finesse, there is a 100% no-risk money back guarantee policy included, which means that if by any reason you don’t like the plugin over the next 7 days, you will get a full refund of your money (but there are very slim chances that something like that will happen).
To check out all of the features and possibilities of this plugin, give this link a click. If you decided to take good care of your website from now on, there is one more thing you should think about while proceeding with the reset process (or any other type of maintenance work). Do you really want your users to see the mess that is going on before you reach the polished end product?
You should have some sort of shield while your hands are getting dirty, and there are a few plugins out there to help you out with that task as well. Instead of having insights in that chaos, display your users with a „under maintenance mode“ website that will keep everything professional and tight while you can calmly continue with your tasks behind the scenes. If that commodity, followed by features like over a million free photos, hundreds of themes and templates, simple interface and usage and many more sound appealing to you, you should definitely check these plugins out as well:
In conclusion, deleting themes on WordPress is a process that will come along sooner or later. You might’ve been piling them up and reached a critical number, there might be too many updates that are driving you crazy, maybe even a security issue or you just want to tidy things up. Nevertheless, you need a proper method to get the job done, but doing it by hand is just too exhausting and obnoxiously lacking in efficiency. And why would you when in the modern era we have tools that will carry out the task flawlessly in record time and minimum effort? Reach out for the right plugin and keep doing what you do best – produce content, while the plugin does what it does best – keep your website fresh, smooth and perfectly optimized.
