Have you ever wondered if you can completely delete your WordPress site from the Internet? Just by removing your WordPress installation, your site is not entirely removed from the Internet. It will become unavailable but the remains of your website still exists.
There are several traces of your website on the Internet scattered here and there. In this guide, you will learn how you can completely remove your WordPress site and its content from the Internet.
It is always advised to backup a copy of your website before removing it permanently.
Step 1:
Login into your cPanel using your credentials and locate File Manager. It has all the contents of your WordPress website. Click File Manager and go to the root directory. Delete all the files present there.
You can use an FTP client to remove all the files if you don’t have access to your cPanel.
Step 2:
After deleting your website, you need to block search engines from searching your website. To stop the search engines, you need to create a robots.txt file inside your File Manager which will tell search engines not to look for your site. Add the following lines in the file:
User-agent: * Disallow: /
The above lines will disable crawlers from accessing URL which falls in your domain name.
Step 3:
Next step, you need to tell that your website’s content is no longer available in the internet. For that, you need to strictly communicate to search engines using the following codes in the .htaccess file. First, create a .htaccess file in the root directory of your website using File Manager or FTP client.
Add the following line of codes to your .htaccess file.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/robots.txt
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [L,G]Here, example.com is your domain name. This code will redirect and show 410 error to all the incoming requests.
Conclusion:
That’s it. You’ve learned how you can completely remove a WordPress site from the internet.
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