How to Uninstall and Reinstall WordPress
Categories: Troubleshooting
In this post I have explained how you can uninstall and reinstall WordPress. You will rarely think about uninstalling/reinstalling WordPress on your site unless you start having ‘Apache security mod rewrite and htaccess’ issue like myself. I decided to Reinstall WordPress on one of my sites after trying numerous fixes to solve the issue and getting no result. Some people uninstall/reinstall WordPress to start over from scratch. Anyway, whatever the reason is, you can uninstall and reinstall WordPress the following ways.
Approach 1 (Full Clean Uninstall)
- Delete all your WordPress files and folders from the site (usually from your ‘public_html’ directory).
- Delete the WordPress database user and table (usual through ‘cPanel’ control panel if your site has ‘cPanel’)
- Now Install WordPress from the beginning like you did the first time and you are done (How to install WordPress).
Approach 2 (Quick Fix Uninstall)
- Delete the WordPress database user and table.
- Create new database user and table and update the ‘wp-config.php’ file with the new information (alternatively you can reuse the same user name and table name from previous and you won’t have to update the ‘wp-config.php’ file)
- Run the installer (install.php) by visiting your site.
It’s always a good idea to use the ‘robots.txt’ on your site to control the access of the web robots such as google bot from coming and indexing your site when you are doing extended maintenance. You don’t want the bot to crawl and index your site when you just deleted the entire content of your site! Read the How to control access of the web crawlers or web robots to your site article to learn more.
#1 by Horst on November 8, 2009 - 1:00 pm
Thanks for the good advice. I was looking for a way to set up a new wordpress project out of an already existing wp system. Kind like a “clone”. Why that? To avoid the efforts of reinstalling and configuring all the plugins and settings etc.
Don’t know if this would work? If you have any ideas how to do this “cloning” please drop me a few lines to horst.graebner (ad) gmx (dot) com. Thanks.
#2 by jm on November 27, 2009 - 8:03 pm
hi i had problem, how can i delete the secondary article, because everytime i add a new article, the articles always goes to the secondary articles, the article should go on the primary articles, pls. help me..
#3 by admin on November 27, 2009 - 9:22 pm
@jm, not sure I understand what you mean by primary and secondary articles in wordpress.
#4 by seo specialist on December 17, 2009 - 8:44 am
thanks for the detailed information on Wordpres Installation, i was looking for this solutions since 6 month, i have re-install my wordpress and its working perfect. thanks again.
#5 by rosie on January 7, 2010 - 2:30 pm
hello – im new to databasing. can you go into a bit more detail on how to delete the wordpress database’s ‘user and table’?
#6 by Daniel on January 14, 2010 - 9:17 am
what is table? can you elaborate?
#7 by admin on January 15, 2010 - 9:42 pm
A table in this context is referring to a “MySQL Database Table”.
#8 by chris brown on February 9, 2010 - 9:52 am
How do I get the photos to show up again? I copied them from the FTP client into my hard drive… then after I reinstalled the database, I copied them back into into the FTP client, but they are “connecting”.
They don’t appear in my media gallery. Do I need to re upload all of them again? Yikes.
Plese advise.
#9 by admin on February 11, 2010 - 3:03 am
Not sure what you mean.. can you elaborate please?