Remove/Delete Inactive Plugins & Themes - WordPress Security | WP Learning Lab

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In this tutorial I'm going to show you how to remove active plugins and themes that are installed on your WordPress site.

Why would you want to do this?

Plugins and themes that are inactive can still be accessed by hackers and used to break into your site if those plugins and themes have vulnerabilities.

The problem is that inactive plugins and themes sit on the site getting older and more and outdated. When updates do come along webmasters usually don't update them because their inactive anyway, why waste the time doing the update?

Inevitably, vulnerabilities creep in and your WordPress security is compromised. So, an easy step towards hack prevention is deleting all plugins and themes that are not currently active on your WordPress site.

If you need those plugins or themes in the future you can install them again.

If you absolutely cannot delete a plugin please at least make sure that you update it when updates come along.

To update plugins all you have to do is click on the Plugins menu option on the left hand side of the page. Plugins with updates available will have a light orange/red background. Click on the update button below them each one or use the Bulk Update feature.

To delete all inactive plugins click on the Inactive link near the top of the plugins page. This will filter the plugins list to show only the ones that are inactive. Select all of them and choose Delete from the Bulk Actions menu and click Apply.

To delete themes click on Appearance in the left hand menu. Then click on the Theme Details for all inactive themes and then click on the Delete link in the bottom right corner of the popup.

There, that wasn't hard and your website is now much more secure!

I hope this information helps you! If you have any questions leave a comment below or ping me @WPLearningLab on Twitter.

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