delete wordpress account
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The instructions can be a little confusing because, since it’s not technically possible to completely delete an account, they’re more of a checklist of ways to remove as much personal information from the account as possible, so not all of them may apply to your situation. That’s where it’s easy to get a little turned around, as far as what you need to worry about doing and what you don’t.
The first step is always to delete any blogs you have active, but it looks like you’ve already got that part covered, so great job!
Next thing is to go to your profile and delete your First Name, Last Name, Public Display Name, and About Me so that all of those boxes are empty, and then hit Save Profile Details. That will make you effectively invisible and identity-less as far as your public profile goes.
Next stop is going to be your Account Settings, and here’s where it may get a little trickier. Let’s go from the top-down, starting with your username.
If you don’t want your current username associated with your account, you can change it to any random gibberish that’s not already taken by somebody else. Be warned, though: once it’s changed, it can never be changed back to your original username, and no one else can use the original either, so if you ever want to start a new WordPress account, you’ll have to start with a new name.
Next line down is your email address, and this is one of those optional changes that might not apply to your case. Every account has to have a valid email associated with it, so you can’t just delete it or replace it with gibberish like almost everything else we’re covering. If you’d like, you can leave it how it is now, and just unsubscribe from all WordPress emails, so they never send you anything (more on that in a moment).
However, if you go that route, it means that if you want to create a new WordPress account later, you can’t use that same email, because each email address has a one-account limit. So, the alternative is to change your email to a different address. It’d have to be one that you have access to, but it doesn’t have to be one that you check regularly – or ever again, if you don’t want to.
If you already have multiple email addresses, you can just change it to one of your other ones, or if not, you can sign up for a throwaway account from a free email service like Yahoo or Hotmail, sign into it just once to confirm the email change with WordPress, and then happily forget about its existence.
Last thing to potentially change on this page will be the Web Address, which, like the rest of your public profile info, you can just leave blank. Then hit Save Account settings, and move on to the next page.
To fully lock your account so that neither you nor anyone else can sign into it, just change your password on the Security page to a random string of letters – again, gibberish. Mash the keyboard to your heart’s content, then hit Save Password. All done here!
Finally, the very last step is to tell WordPress not to email you anything. This one is also optional, because if you changed your address to a throwaway email in the step above, you probably won’t care if WordPress sends anything to an inbox you’ll never check. If you are still using that email address, though, you’ll want to go to your Subscriptions page and check the box at the bottom under Block Emails, then hit Save Notification Settings.
And you’re done! Sign out for the last time, safe in the knowledge that no one is ever seeing that account again.
I know the process seems a little intimidating when it’s all laid out like that, but it’s really just a couple quick pages of setting changes to effectively delete everything from your account without being able to delete the account itself. Hope this helps!
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