WordPress Multisite: How to Delete an Individual Site

I recently wanted to delete a staging site from a multisite network I use for testing.

A little surprisingly though, the UI does not make it immediately obvious.

In this tutorial, I cover how to delete an individual website from a WordPress multisite network. This does not remove the WordPress multisite feature entirely.

Why Delete a Site from a Multisite Network?

WordPress multisites makes it convenient to test out out themes or develop staging/demo sites. There’s other use cases, such as managing sub-domains.

But once you’re done with a website, it continues to use up storage and database space on your hosting server. All plugins and themes, even if kept up-to-date, carry intrinsic security risks, too.

So deleting an unwanted website from your multisite network is a good idea. (Keep a backup of course.)

Step 1: Login to Your WordPress Website

Ensure you have Admin privileges. It does not matter if you are on the Network Dashboard, or any individual site on the network.

Step 2: Navigate to All Sites

Use the top navigation menu to get to All Sites. Here’s how you get there:

• Hover over ‘My Sites’
• Hover over ‘Network Admin’ in the drop-down menu
• Select ‘Sites’ in the sub drop-down menu

Step 3: Select and Delete Your Desired Website on the Multisite Network

You will now be presented with a table of the active websites on your multisite network.

Select ‘Delete’ for your desired website.

Or use the bulk action, and delete multiple sites off the network at once.

Step 4: Confirm Deletion

WordPress will now ask to confirm your deletion of the website from the network. This is permanent. Select ‘Confirm’ to proceed with the deletion.