How to Uninstall and Reinstall WordPress

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)

1. Delete all your WordPress files and folders from the site (usually from your ‘public_html’ directory).
2. Delete the WordPress database user and table (usual through ‘cPanel’ control panel if your site has ‘cPanel’)
3. Now Install WordPress from the beginning like you did the first time and you are done 

Approach 2 (Quick Fix Uninstall)

1. Delete the WordPress database user and table.
2. 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)
3. 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!