Of course, we hope you’ll love using The Events Calendar and always use our plugin, but we understand that situations come up where you’ll need to uninstall a WordPress plugin.
In this article, we’ll show you how to uninstall any WordPress plugin the right way so that you don’t leftover database entries or plugin files left behind.
Uninstall a plugin from the WordPress Dashboard
You can uninstall a WordPress plugin in a few different ways. The first way is to head over to the WordPress Dashboard > Plugins > Installed Plugins and click on Deactivate next to the plugin you’d like to uninstall. Then click Delete.
This is the simplest method to uninstall a plugin, although it does not remove any additional data from the plugin.
Uninstall a plugin via FTP
If you’re comfortable using FTP, you can access your plugin files that way and delete them from there.
To do this, simply connect to your site via FTP. Navigate to your /wp-content/plugins folder and locate the plugin you want to delete to remove it from your server.
Like the previous method, this method does not remove any additional data created by the plugin. If you plan never to use the plugin again, you may want to take some extra steps to remove that data.
Manually clean up tables
The above methods are great for a quick uninstall, but they can leave behind plugin files that can slow down your site’s performance over time.
There are a few different ways to manually clean up database tables left behind. We recommend you back up your WordPress site first, and then you can proceed with one of the following methods.
Use a plugin
You can use a plugin to remove database tables manually. We recommend Advanced Database Cleanup to help you delete orphaned tables.
Uses phpMyAdmin
Alternatively, you can log in to phpMyAdmin and search for the plugin files you’d like to delete. Many plugins name their tables similarly to their plugin name, making it easy to find them.