Deleting Themes from Your WordPress Installation

Last updated: August 11, 2018 at 18:40 pm

 

You already know how to search for, install and activate themes on your WordPress site. As I mentioned before, you should keep installed themes to a bare minimum. This is because themes take up space and other resources and may slow your website down. Further, you’ll be bothered frequently to update themes you’re not using.

However, you may have installed quite a number themes just to test them out and find the one you like best for your website.

After that, it’s time to go back into your WordPress Dashboard and delete all the themes you’re not using.

So let’s do this.

Log back in to your WordPress Dashboard by typing yourdomain.com/wp-admin, then entering your username and password and click “Log in.”

Once inside the Dashboard, click on: My Sites >> Network Admin >> Themes.

This will now open the themes Dashboard so that we can list a list of all themes we currently have installed on our WordPress Installation.

As you can probably see, we have a total of 27 themes installed on our WordPress Installation. 22 of these are “network enabled” or “network activated.” The terms “network enabled” and “network activated” are interchangeable terms which mean the same thing: the theme can now be used on our website.

We can also install a theme and leave it there “disabled.” Disabled themes cannot be used until you “Network Enable” them. This  is done with a simple click.

However, our objective is to delete themes. We can only delete themes which are not network enabled or, in other words, “network disabled.”

So let’s go ahead and start deleting those themes which are already network disabled.

As you can see, a theme that is network disabled already has the “Delete” button looming over its head like the Sword of Damocles, so to speak.

Just click the delete button. A confirmation window will pop up asking you if you are sure you want to delete the theme. Click “OK” and the theme will be deleted. A message will appear where the theme was that it is now deleted.

So first, I’m going to delete all the themes that were disabled that I will show you how to tackle the ones that are enabled.

Great. So I’ve deleted all the disabled themes. Deleting an enabled theme is just as simple. All you have to do is disable it first.

Right under an enabled theme is a button to Disable it: Network Disable. Just click that button.

Once you click the Disable Button, the theme will be disabled and the Delete button will appear. Just click the delete, confirm that you want to delete by clicking OK when the confirmation message pop up and the theme will be deleted.

Great! So you now know how to delete themes and keep your Dashboard clean.

See you in the next lesson: Searching for Themes by Keywords.

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