How to Completely Uninstall Elementor from Database

This link has a number of options for your question:
Delete files that are not deleted in the uninstall and also how to clean out the database.
This article highly suggests a backup and the expertise to go into the database.
You might also go into any Pages/Posts with the WP Editor and make sure your not deleting any content you want to save. I recently learned edits made in WP or Elementor are not commonly shared between the two.

https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-properly-uninstall-a-wordpress-plugin/

• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by LesTexas60.

Thanks Les. I’m familiar with those techniques and saw that article. I make regular backups and have browsed the database for Elementor’s footprint. I’m hoping someone from Elementor will chime in with specifics.

Just curious, what else are you trying to remove? Do you have a backup of the site before your developer added the Elementor. If so you could take his additions from the Elementor version and add them in WP.
Just a thought

Les, there were several entries coming up when doing a search in PHPmyAdmin. I managed to eliminate all of them safely (except for three fields with serialized data). I’m OK with those results.

Elementor was added prior to a bunch of other work so restoring from a backup was not really an option.

Thanks for your input and ideas. Much appreciated!

I havn’t used Elementor that long but I can see where it is an All-In or nothing approach.
Personally I like the theme design capabilities much better than a separate theme program.
Sad that someone would add such an intrusive plugin to your site without asking first.

It doesn’t look like clean up is a fun process that’s for sure.

I agree it should have a mechanism to clean up after itself and remove ALL database entries and files completely.

There used to be an option within the builder editor that would allow you to reset all Elementor data for that specific post/page but it seems it was silently removed but not sure why. I looked pretty darn hard but cannot find it. So I suppose a _postmeta scrub via PHPMyAdmin is the only way other than right click deleting all builder elements until you’re left with an empty page.

Then in the backend, one would have to manually remove any and all Elementor Templates such as headers, footers, sections, pages etc. The best way to delete in bulk would be from the All types tab that lists all templates.

Then back to PHPMyAdmin/db editor and remove all elementor entries from:

wp_options
wp_postmeta
wp_posts
wp_term_taxonomy
wp_usermeta

* replace wp_ with your own db prefix if using a custom prefix
** some need to be carefully removed as some entries are serialized amongst other data <- not fun!

And lastly, scrub the file system -> /wp-content/uploads/elementor

I thought I had gotten them all but your very last line reminded me of the uploads folder. Thanks for the detailed suggestions Phillip!

@grndrm Just out of curiosity, why you would not use any page builder?
Speaking more from a designer perspective than as a developer, especially Elementor gives so many options to design WordPress sites in a fun way.
What is the contra to a page builder?