When website plans change, you might make big updates to your default language content. Or, you might decide not to use a secondary language anymore.
In these situations, you may want to remove all WPML data from both the front-end of your WordPress site and your website’s database. This includes tables and translations. By doing this, you take your website back to how it was before you used WPML. Then, when you reinstall the plugin, you can start with a clean slate.
To do this, you need to follow a 3-step process:
It is important that you follow this exact order for these steps.
Step 1: Remove the secondary language(s) and all existing translations
WPML offers the option to remove secondary languages from your site. When you remove the secondary language(s), you delete all existing content in that language from your site’s database.
Go to WPML → Languages. In the Sites Languages section, Remove the secondary language(s) of your choice.
A table with the deactivated languages appears. Click on the delete icon to remove all the content you have translated into your secondary language from the database.
Deleting the existing translations for your removed secondary language from your site and database
Important:
In some cases, this feature might not delete translations of taxonomy terms.
This feature is available in versions WPML 4.5.9 and above.
Step 2: Delete the MO and PO Files for the Removed Language
After you remove a language and its translations from your database, other themes and plugins on your site may continue downloading translation files in that language.
To prevent this from happening, you need to delete any leftover MO and PO files for that language:
Access your website using an FTP Tool such as FileZilla.
Go to your site’s ../wp-content/languages/plugins/ folder.
Delete the MO and PO files ending with the language code of the language you want to delete. For example, if you removed the Spanish language (ES) with the Spanish locale (es), the language files would end with -es_ES.mo and -es_ES.po.
To delete theme translations, open the themes folder in ../wp-content/languages/ and follow the instructions from the third step above.
Step 3: Do the WPML Reset
The final step is to reset WPML. This removes WPML tables from the site’s database and deactivates the plugin.
The WPML reset cannot be undone. All translations you have sent to remote translation services will be lost.
We recommend that you create a backup of your site before resetting WPML.
Go to WPML → Support and click the Troubleshooting link.
In the Reset section of the Troubleshooting page, select the I am about to reset all translation and language data checkbox. Then, click the Reset and deactivate WPML button.
Clicking the button to reset and deactivate WPML
After completing all these steps, WPML will be reset and deactivated, effectively removing its data from your site.
When you’re ready to start translating again, you will need to reinstall and configure WPML.
