Remove GoDaddy’s WordPress plugin

When you create a managed WordPress instance with GoDaddy, they gift you a few “system plugins” that can’t be easily removed. This bundle includes the very basic, and now unsupported(!), Limit Login Attempts plugin. There are many better plugins out there to achieve what GoDaddy gives you out of the box so let’s get right to it. To disable GoDaddy’s mandatory WordPress plugin, you’ll need 2 pieces of access:

1. WordPress administrator access
2. (S)FTP access to the hosting

Since GoDaddy uses server-side caching, we must take a couple of extra steps when disabling the plugin so that your site does not have it (or now broken pieces of it) cached.

Step 1.

Disable all caching plugins you have installed in WordPress.

Step 2.

Log into your site via (S)FTP and rename /wp-content/object-cache.php to something like /wp-content/object-cache-disabled.php

Step 3.

Log into your site’s WordPress admin dashboard and, in the upper admin bar, hover over GoDaddy and click to clear the cache.

Step 4.

Via (S)FTP, rename the folder /wp-content/mu-plugins to /wp-content/mu-plugins.disabled (you may need to first set permissions to allow writing to /wp-content/).

Step 5.

Rename /wp-content/object-cache-disabled.php back to /wp-content/object-cache.php

Step 6.

Clear your browser cache and check if the site is working as expected and that the annoying GoDaddy plugin options are gone. Remember, you can always removed the “.disabled” part of the plugin name via FTP to restore the plugin if needed.