How to Delete WordPress Themes

19 Jan, 2024 By Utillz

How to Delete WordPress Themes

How to delete WordPress themes and why you should do that?

Some hosting provides will offer you a WordPress installation with pre-installed themes, and you could end up with, like, 10 installed themes. Usually, you should keep just one theme, a child theme ( optional ), and one theme alternative theme for troubleshooting purposes.

Why You Should Delete Your Unused WordPress Themes

There are many reasons to take this action, but the main one is security. The content of your inactive WordPress themes is still accessible for the web, so anyone can infiltrate through any outdated files.

Other important reasons for deleting unused WordPress themes are:

Server spacing
Less update notifications to do
Admin dashboard performance

How to Uninstall a WordPress Theme Using the Admin Dashboard

Ok, let’s dive into it and learn how to delete any WordPress theme from your admin dashboard.

Login to your admin dashboard
Go to Appearance > Themes

Select the theme that you are willing to delete. Deleting an activated theme, requires switching to another theme.
Then click the button, Delete, that appears in the bottom-right side of the modal

Click ok in the confirmation window, and you are done.

How to Delete a WordPress Theme Using FTP Client

This method is more complicated, especially if you don’t know how to use an FTP client. But, lets some that you have FTP access, and you are connected to your server.

Here are the steps:

Connect to your FTP client
Locate your WordPress root directory
Go to /wp-content/themes folder
Right-click the theme folder you want to delete and press Delete

It will take a few seconds to delete the theme from your server. This method is risky, because you can delete your current active theme. This is why, you should first make a backup, using this method.

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Anjali Jha March 21, 2024