Need to Get Rid of that WordPress.com Website? Here is how you do it.
If you have a WordPress website that you would now like to get rid of, this post is for you. We are going to walk you through the process; but first, we need to discuss some of the reasons why people may be compelled to delete their websites. That is important, because creating a website takes time, effort and money. So, why would anyone wish to delete a WordPress Website? You can skip this section by clicking on this link
Why Delete a WordPress Website
There are a number of reasons why you may end up wanting to delete your WordPress Website. We should point out here that this article is going to only look at how to get rid of a hosted WordPress website. For more about hosted and self hosted websites, feel free to read the article in the provided link.
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The Site Is No Longer Relevant
The first reason why you may be looking to delete a WordPress website would be if the site has lost its relevancy.
- As part of our tutorials, we created Get A Simple WordPress.com Site; a blog on which we never posted any content.
- Now that it has served its purpose, we are going to delete it; all in the name of knowledge. In any case, you may be in a similar situation and may be looking to rid yourself of a site that has lost its relevance.
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The Website/Blog no longer represents your interests
Another of the reasons why you may wish to delete a WordPress website is if it no longer is representative of your interests.
- What do we mean by this? Perhaps you had previously presented your brand in a way that is markedly different from what you are doing today.
- Your company or brand may have been purchased by someone else, in which case they would need to delete the blog as a way of making sure that all their digital marketing efforts are in sync with one another.
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The Website in Question was a Test Site
This point is related to the first one in that, after the testing phase, you may need to delete a WordPress website that is no longer relevant to your needs.
- While this can, once again, appear to be a waste, the point remains that, as is the case with the blog that we are going to sacrifice, all that you may have been interested in was learning how things work on WordPress.com before moving to bigger things.
- If that is the case, you may be looking for a way through which you can delete your WordPress Website.
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You Have Moved To Bigger Things
This brings us to the next reason why you may wish to delete a WordPress site. Perhaps, your brand has grown and you now have another site that, you believe, better represents the kind of image that you wish to project to the outside world. While, you may argue, it would be more logical to simply allow the site to grow, without deleting it, that is hardly the point here.
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You Do Not Want a Competing Site
Related to this would be the fact that, perhaps, you no longer wish to have a competing website, and now wish to focus on your most mature effort. Deleting one website gives you the chance to shift your focus to where it really needs to be.
Deleting a WordPress Website
Now that we have that off our chest, we are going to show you how exactly you go about deleting a free WordPress.com website;
a. Go to the Backend of the Site in Question
The first thing that you need to do in order to delete a WordPress website involves going to the backend of your site.
- To do so, all that you need to do is append /wp-admin to whatever the url of the doomed site is. In our case the website’s url is getasimplewordpressblog.wordpress.com.
- Adding the above mentioned line to the url takes you to the backend of your site. You may need to log in to gain access. If, for one reason or the other (including sheer neglect), you have forgotten your login credentials, you can recover these through the provided facility.
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b. Click on the Tools Tab
The next thing that you need to do as you set out, grimly, we should hope, to delete your unwanted WordPress.com site, is click on the Tools Tab. This can be found near the bottom left corner of your admin page.
- Clicking on the above mentioned tab brings up a number of options, almost all of which are no longer relevant, now that we have decided to delete our example website.
- You can see the option, on the bottom left corner of the screen, below “Import” and “Export” options.
- Interestingly, this option is not available if you have gone the self hosted WordPress website option.
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c. Delete Site
Clicking on the option to delete your site takes you to the page below, where you are provided with the option to first export your content. This is definitely a welcome facility, that you can use to make sure that all the posts, pages and settings that you have previously worked so hard on do not get completely lost.
- Because there is nothing that we would wish to preserve on our test site (in fact, there is nothing there that can be deleted), we are going to scroll down to the bottom of the above screen and press Delete Site (The option is ominously available in red).
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d. Confirm Site Deletion
Probably because WordPress.com does not believe that you would stoop so low as to delete a website or blog, you are asked to confirm that you actually like to go ahead with this most drastic of steps.
- You have to confirm your site’s deletion by typing in the doomed site’s domain
- Clicking on Delete this site removes the website from your portfolio.
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Afterwards
I have to admit to getting hit by a few pangs of regret after deleting the example website. It did, after all, represent a measurable amount of my time. Now that I have gotten rid of it, I get the screenshot below when I trying to open the blog in question.
