How to Delete a WordPress Plugin Manually via FTP

Deleting a plugin from WordPress using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is relatively straightforward. Follow these steps:

  1. Backup your website: Before doing any changes, it’s always good practice to backup your website, including your files and database. In case anything goes wrong, you can restore your website from the backup. You can use WP STAGING to backup your website.
  2. Download and install an FTP client: FTP clients like FileZilla, Cyberduck, or WinSCP can be used to access your website files. Download and install an FTP client if you haven’t already.
  3. Connect to your website: Open your FTP client and connect to your website using the FTP credentials. You can obtain these from your hosting provider if you don’t already have them.
  4. Navigate to the plugins directory: In the FTP client, navigate to the directory that contains your WordPress installation. The path to your plugins folder is usually something like public_html/wp-content/plugins/.
  5. Locate and delete the plugin: Within the ‘plugins’ directory, you’ll find the directories for all your plugins. Each plugin has its own directory, and the name usually matches the name of the plugin. To delete a plugin, locate its directory, right-click on it and choose the delete option from the context menu.
  6. Confirm deletion: The FTP client will ask you to confirm the deletion. Confirm that you want to delete the plugin. This will permanently delete the plugin and all its files from your server.

Remember, deleting a plugin this way will remove it completely from your website, but it won’t delete any data that the plugin has stored in your database. If you wish to remove the plugin’s data from your database as well, you’ll need to do this manually through your database management interface like phpMyAdmin.

Please note that deleting a plugin via FTP should be your last resort. The preferred method to delete a plugin is through the WordPress admin interface, as it ensures that any cleanup function the plugin may have is properly run.

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Author: Rene Hermenau

I'm René Hermenau, founder of WP STAGING. I've been building WordPress infrastructure software since 2013 and writing code on GitHub since 2011. My repos live at github.com/rene-hermenau. WP STAGING started as a small developer project solving the same problem I kept hitting on client work: there was no fast, safe way to clone a WordPress site for staging or migration without breaking serialized data, file paths, or media references. Today we are a team of more than 10 people. The free plugin runs on hundreds of thousands of WordPress installations, and the Pro version powers backup, migration, and staging workflows for agencies, hosting platforms, and ecommerce stores. I'm still hands-on with the codebase and technical architecture. Our releases are built as a team, but many of the core architectural decisions are ones I helped design, test, and evolve over the years: how we handle large database exports, how we keep memory usage flat on multi-GB sites, and how we make migrations atomic against partially written tables. "When you touch code, leave it 10% better than before and write a test." If you're stuck on a WP STAGING question, the docs are at wp-staging.com/docs. If you hit a bug, file it on GitHub at github.com/wp-staging. Our team reads everything that lands there.