Unable to delete site, Admin no longer works for organisation since 2012

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  bunburygail · Member · Sep 2, 2015 at 5:40 am

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  Hi,

  I work for City of Bunbury Libraries and I need to talk to someone about removing this website as it is severely out of date, no longer utilised by us and causing a great deal of confusion for our customers.

  I have been able to obtain a moderator login to access the site and turn most of the pages to private, however I am unable to access the homepage or delete the site as I do not have the original admin details who set up the website.

  The staff member who setup the site left the organisation in 2012, before myself and new Library Management started.

  The website is: bunburyshelflife.wordpress.com

  Hoping someone from WordPress can contact me to discuss what we can do as I really need to get this website taken down as soon as possible.

  Thank you for your assistance.

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  rachelmcr · Member · Sep 2, 2015 at 8:34 am

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  Hi there,

  Only the site’s owner can permanently delete the site, or another administrator on the site can change its Privacy Settings to make it entirely private.

  If you have access to the email address the former staff member used to set up this site (and the associated WordPress.com account that owns it), you can reset the account password here:

  https://wordpress.com/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword

  Or you can follow the steps in our Account Recovery guide to try to regain access to one of the administrator accounts on the site. You can fill out the recovery form mentioned there for more assistance with that (we’re unable to help with recovery issues like that here in the public forums).

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  auxclass · Member · Sep 2, 2015 at 3:15 pm

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  If you have Editor or Admin status, you could change all the Posts and Pages to Private (the bulk edit might work here) (or delete the Posts / Pages) – – then leave a single Post at the top of the front page (a new post) – with a note that you have moved with a link to your new site – with all the content not reachable by search engines the search results for the old site should drop like a rock

  WordPress has a dynamic front page so you have no direct access to it, only to the Posts and Pages that display on the front page – – when someone visits the “front page” WordPress does a series of database calls and builds the “front page” on the fly