How to manually disable Wordpress plugin

I recently did a mistake by installing a bad Wordpress plugin which was not updated by it's developers for few months. I did not have any issues with this plugin till I thought of uninstalling it. This plugin was disabled for a long time, but was not uninstalled. But, when I tried uninstalling this plugin - GONE.. My website home page was displaying white screen and nothing else. Not sure what to call this - White screen of death ? :)

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I couldn't even login to my admin account /wp-admin page to view my dashboard and was all white. To fix this issue the only option that I had was to login to my hosting server and fix this. I use (as of this writing) GoDaddy for domain and hosting and the below image is from my hosting server. If you have hosted your website or blog in some other hosting server then you might find similar folders and many not be exactly the same. Even a minor change in the code or if there is a semicolon missing, is enough to bring down your website. So, be very careful when you login to your hosting server. It's better to download a copy of all the files once in a week or month as backup. Also, before you modify any file in the hosting server, don't forget to download that particular file as backup.

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The usual method to disable and uninstall a plugin is to go to Wordpress dashboard >> Plugins and then select or search for the plugin that is to be uninstalled. And while uninstalling a plugin from dashboard you don't have to worry about file backup even though it is recommended to. If you want to manually disable Wordpress plugin then follow the following steps:

• Login to your hosting server Ex: GoDaddy in my case.


• Once you click on hosting tab, you will see the below window.


• Click on 'webroot', followed by 'wp-content'.


• Under 'wp-content' there are multiple folders and 'plugins' is one among them.


• Do not delete any of the files here and better to backup before modifying any of the files.


• Just rename the plugins folder. Example: plugins_old.


• Click on Save and refresh your webpage. If the issue is with one of the plugins then you website should be back and up without any issues, with all the plugins disabled (will display path not found or 404 error in Wordpress dashboard).

If you know which plugin was causing these errors or issues then inside plugins folder each of the plugins that are already installed will have a separate folder. Just rename or delete (if you are sure) the files that are corrupt.

[caption id="attachment_2290" align="aligncenter" width="606"] Image Source: From my hosting server[/caption]

The issue need not always be with the plugins. Sometimes the wp-config file might be corrupt. For some plugins, just uninstalling isn't enough. You need to update the wp-config file as well to remove it completely else, you might get a similar issue. Try this at your own risk.

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