Uninstalling Scalability Pro Safely

Scalability Pro is designed to be completely reversible. It never changes your content, and everything it adds can be taken back out. This article explains exactly what happens when you deactivate the plugin, what happens when you delete it, and how to get to a fully clean state if you want one.

What happens when you deactivate

Deactivating Scalability Pro does three things automatically:

1. It stops all of its query optimisations and rewrites. Your queries immediately go back to running exactly as WordPress and your other plugins would run them on their own.

1. It drops all of the database indexes it created. This is the important one, and it surprises people. Deactivation runs a routine that removes every Scalability Pro index from your tables, so your site reverts to the indexes it had before. Nothing in your data changes, but the speed-up those indexes provided is gone.

1. It tidies up two smaller things: it removes the $SPRO_GLOBALS block from your wp-config.php (used by the Slow Query Log), and it clears the daily scheduled event the plugin registers.

Because deactivation deletes the indexes, if you deactivate and later reactivate, you must recreate them. Go to the Indexes tab, click Select All, then Update Indexes, and wait for it to finish (the Quick Start Guide has the full walkthrough). This is the single most common cause of a site that “was fast, then went slow”. If you are running a large live site, avoid deactivating unless you plan to recreate the indexes straight afterwards.

What happens when you delete

Scalability Pro has no uninstall.php file and registers no uninstall hook, so deleting the plugin does not run any extra cleanup of its own. In practice WordPress runs the deactivation routine before it lets you delete an active plugin, so by the time the files are removed the indexes have already been dropped. Deleting then removes the plugin’s files.

Two things are left behind after deletion:

• Settings. Scalability Pro stores its options in the WordPress wp_options table (for example wpiperf_settings and a few cached-value options). These remain in the database.

• Its own helper tables. The plugin creates a small number of tables for caching and diagnostics, such as wp_scalability_pro_cache, wp_scalability_pro_post_count_cache, wp_scalability_pro_transient_cache, wp_scalability_pro_profiling and wp_spro_slow_query_log (your prefix may differ from wp_). These are not removed automatically.

None of this leftover data affects your site once the plugin is gone. It simply sits idle.

The indexes it created, and why they are already gone

The extra indexes are covered in full in Custom Database Indexes. They are ordinary MySQL indexes with their own distinct names (they never alter a core WordPress index), so they only ever speed queries up and never change how anything behaves. Leaving that kind of index in place does no harm at all.

The point to understand for uninstalling is that Scalability Pro does not leave them behind. It removes them for you on deactivation, which is why there is nothing to clean up here and why you have to recreate them if you ever reactivate. If you specifically want a clean before-and-after speed comparison, deactivating is enough to get you back to the unindexed baseline.

If you really want a completely clean removal

Deactivating, then deleting, already returns your database schema to how it was: the indexes are gone and the plugin’s code is gone. If you also want to remove the data the plugin stored, there is no one-click “remove everything” button, so you would do it by hand:

• Settings. Delete the plugin’s options from wp_options. The main one is wpiperf_settings, alongside a handful of spro_-prefixed cache options. Removing them only discards saved preferences.

• Helper tables. The five tables listed above are created and used solely by Scalability Pro, so dropping them is safe once the plugin is gone. Take a database backup first, and only drop tables whose names match those above. Do not touch WordPress core tables.

If you are not sure, the safest choice is simply to leave the leftover options and tables in place. They are inert and cost you nothing.

In short

You do not need to do anything special to uninstall Scalability Pro safely. Deactivation reverses every optimisation and removes the indexes on its own, deletion removes the code, and the only things that linger are a few harmless settings and helper tables you can tidy up manually if you like. The custom indexes are never a problem to leave in place anywhere they appear, and here the plugin removes them for you regardless.

Further reading

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