How to delete a broken Plugin – From the Backend [Video]

What will we be learning?

We will be learning how to delete a corrupted or broken plugin in wordpress. This can be done using an FTP client or File Manager of your hosting account.

Why might you want to delete a broken wordpress plugin?

Well, if you’ve ever made changes to your wordpress website in the editor or within the settings of a plugins, you may run into various issues. The first being a frozen website, or maybe the white screen of death. Whatever the reason, you know the problem, you just may not know how to fix the issue. By deleting the plugin you can effectively remove the issue. However, the only problem is that you won’t be able to login to the backend of wordpress to do so. Therefore, we’ll show you how to delete a broken plugin when you may have no access to the backend of wordpress.

In this tutorial I showed you how to fix the settings of the iThemes Security Plugin if you ever get logged out. However, generally you would probably delete the plugin altogether rather than compress and uncompress it.

[box]Video Title: How to delete a broken plugin from the backend
Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie9ub7iaS_4
Accompanying Course: Beginner’s Guide to WordPress – Web Design Course[/box]

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Transcript: 
So in this video I am going to show you a little bit of troubleshooting for wordpress and let’s say for example you installed a new plugin and it was causing errors on your website or you changed a certain file on your website and now it’s causing these errors for your website.

You can’t see things. You get a white screen, whatever it maybe. In this situation I installed a plugin the ithemes security plugin. One thing that allows us to do, actually did a tutorial on this is how you can change, I guess the log in information for your website.

Generally if you remember, hopefully you guys can see this at the top. It’s your domain dot, domain slash wp-admin. But with the ithemes security plugin, you are allowed to change that so that maybe it will be harder for potential hackers to log in.

But the issue for me is that I actually forgot what I changed it to. I couldn’t remember if it’s my domain slash login slash editor, whatever it may be. And so I am getting this not found error 404 message. But I know exactly where the problem is.

I know it’s in the ithemes security. Just like somebody you guys, I you just recently installed a plugin and then your website crashed. Well you know exactly where the problem maybe. But you just don’t know how to get to it.

So what we are going to do is, we are going to log in to our file manager. This is specific for hostgator. If you don’t have a file manager for your hosting client, then you just do it through FTP, general FTP access. So get all the information to log in to your FTP of your website.

Go into the public HTML and go into wp-content. And then go into plugins because specifically we know which plugin is the issue. And what you are going to do is a couple of things. The first thing you want to do is you want to find that plugin that is causing the problem if it is in fact the plugin.

And remember I mentioned this one called ithemes, the other name for it is also better wp security. I guess that was the original name. So what I went ahead and did is I just compressed it. Right click and then there should be a compress right there. So you just compress and then it will be down here.

And then we will just delete it. So we will just delete our plugin and it will be erased from there. And now we are just going to assume like the plugin’s not even there. So we will be able to login like normal hopefully if everything works well.

So we are able to see that in fact everything did work well and let me just login very quickly. And so what we are going to do now is we can do two things, if you want to reinstall the plugin, we can go ahead and do that. Let’s see if the plugin is actually still there. It may or may not be.

Probably it wouldn’t be in my. Ya so it’s not going to show up here. Let’s see what happens when we do eventually uncompress it. So we can extract it now and we will extract the files. Always make sure what path it’s going to show up in. and let’s refresh the plugins and let’s see if it’s going to show up.

So ya it is in fact installed and we are just going to have to reactivate it. And so now you can change whatever settings it is that you needed to change.