But imagine a site over the course of 10 years, having used hundreds of plugins, that have generated possibly thousands of rows or tables. Unfortunately, another reason we have seen is that some developers might argue that leaving tables behind doesn’t affect the performance of your site. For less tech-savvy users, this could definitely be seen as a benefit, however, it isn’t the most efficient way.īut if for some reason you think you might return to a plugin later on, then yes, simply deleting the plugin using one of the above methods is the best route. Or if for some reason the plugin gets deleted by accident, you don’t have to panic. This means that you can reinstall the plugin at a later time and all your data will still be there. The first reason is that a lot of WordPress users bounce between plugins frequently, and by leaving the tables and rows behind in your database, this retains your settings. They Want to Retain Settings for the User But, here are a couple reasons why they probably aren’t as obvious right off the bat.
So you are probably wondering, why don’t developers have self-cleanup options when you uninstall and delete a plugin? Well, in fact, they do. Inactive WordPress plugins Why Do Developers Do This?