How to Uninstall W3 Total Cache Manually (2023)

If W3 Total Cache is causing issues or throwing error messages, you may need to delete it manually.

In this article, I’ll show you how to quickly remove W3 Total Cache manually and ensure that any other erroneous files are also deleted, enabling you to install a fresh working copy of W3 Total Cache or any other caching plugin.

If you need help installing W3 Total Cache properly, I highly recommend my detailed guide that configures W3 Total Cache to work with CloudFlare for ultimate performance.

How to Manually Uninstall W3 Total Cache

Turn off all Caching under General Settings.

In the General Settings, turn off all the following settings:

Preview mode - Disable
Page Cache - Disable
Minify - Disable
Database Cache - Disable
Object Cache - Disable
Browser Cache - Disable
CDN - Disable

Make sure you click “Save all settings” once you are done.

At the top of the General Settings page, you will see a message confirming that “The plugin is currently disabled.”

Doing this step will remove some configuration settings that are commonly left behind, although I will show you later in this tutorial how to check for these files manually.

Turn off all Caching under General Settings.

Deactivate and Delete W3 Total Cache.

Go to the Plugins Menu in the WordPress admin sidebar
Click “Deactive” under the W3 Total Cache Plugin
Click “Delete”

Check the following files are deleted, and if not, delete manually.

Some core files are used by most Caching Plugins and sometimes by other plugins not related to caching. These files are located in the “wp-content” directory:

cache folder
w3tc-config folder
object-cache.php (if it exists)
advanced-cache.php (if it exists)
dbcache.php (if it exists)
upgrade folder

In addition, you should delete the following:

w3-total-cache folder in wp-content/plugins/ (if exists)

To delete the files, you must log in to your server via SSH, FTP, or Control Panel File Manager.

Remove entries in your .htacess file created by W3 Total Cache.

W3TC makes extensive use of the .htacess file. As such, you will need to verify all of the entries made by W3TC have been deleted. If you disabled all the Caching functionality before removing the plugin, everything should be okay. It is worth checking, though.

Each entry related to W3 total cache will start and end with comments like:

#BEGIN W3TC Page Cache core

#END W3TC Page Cache core

If you are unsure which entries were created by W3 Total Cache, then you can delete everything in the .htacess file and replace it with the following if you have a basic installation of WordPress:

# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress

If you have a multisite installation or still use WordPress 3.4 or below, then you can find the default .htaccess settings here.

Purge files from your CDN (if applicable).

If you use a CDN, such as CloudFlare, you should purge all the files to ensure that any files cached are deleted. This might be necessary if you minimized your files within W3 Total Cache.