How to Delete a Theme in WordPress – A Beginner’s Guide

WordPress beginners will find that it is reasonably intuitive to install WordPress themes. Deleting them, however, is another matter and is slightly more confusing. It can be troublesome because unused WordPress themes take up valuable space on your WordPress site. While not a major issue in itself, it adds up over time and will slow down your website. If you think that’s not a big deal, you might want to reconsider because page speed is going to affect your rank on Google. There’s no need to worry though, it’s quite easy to delete themes once you know how. In this article, we will show you how to delete a theme in WordPress with ease. There are two ways you could do this and the choice is yours.

1. How to Delete a Theme in WordPress Using Appearance Options

Using your Admin Sidebar, go to Appearance>>Themes. From here, just find the themes you want to delete. Remember that the Active Theme cannot be deleted so you will need to activate another theme in that case. To open up the option delete a theme, simply hover over a theme until Theme Details is visible and click on it.

This brings up additional details about this theme. To delete the theme, all you need to do is click on the Delete button on the bottom right. Click on OK in the confirmation dialog box that will appear and your theme will be deleted. It really is that simple.

2. How to Delete a Theme in WordPress Using FTP

Another way to delete WordPress theme if you find the previous method too slow is by using FTP. Using that, you will be able to directly delete the themes. If you aren’t sure how to use FTP, you can check out our handy WordPress FTP Guide.

It’s quite easy to delete themes using FTP. Once you connect to your site, navigate to public_html>>wp-content>>themes. Here, all of the themes that you’ve installed on your WordPress site are stored in different folders.

Now all you need to do is right-click on the theme you want to remove and select delete. When asked for a confirmation, click on Yes and theme will be removed.

Wrapping it Up:

And that’s all there is to it! Now you should know how to delete a WordPress theme. Whether you used FTP or not, it can be done in a few clicks. Knowing how to easily delete themes is sure to come in handy in the future. Deleting old and unused WordPress themes can be an effective way of clearing the clutter from your WordPress site.

If you are new to WordPress and are unsure what type of theme is best for you then our guide on Free vs Premium WordPress themes might help you. Before switching themes, you might also want to take a look at our article on Tips to Consider Before Changing WordPress Themes to be helpful. We also have a useful list of the best WordPress theme marketplaces if you want to go for a premium theme.

While you are here, there are also a number of useful articles on various topics related to WordPress that you can check out.

• How to Disable Comments in WordPress – A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners
• Essential WordPress Security Plugins For 2019
• How to Change a WordPress Theme: A Beginner’s Guide