How to Delete Weebly in Bluehost and Revert WordPress?

Bluehost offers integrated Weebly site builder with various plans to build your site. The problem is that you need to choose a domain to login to Weebly through Bluehost and for a free basic plan you do not have an option to choose sub-domain. So if you have installed Weebly on your Bluehost account for testing purpose then you are struck up now since there is no uninstall Weebly or delete Weebly button.

Installing WordPress on Same Weebly Site

WordPress can be installed on the same domain on which Weebly is already installed. You can access WordPress admin dashboard and start building your site but you will not be able to open your WordPress site. When you open your site’s URL it will display your Weebly site instead of WordPress site. The reason is that WordPress looks for index.php file for opening your site but Weebly uses index.html as a home page. This index.html file presenting in the same WordPress root installation will not allow WordPress to open your home page and hence you will always see Weebly site.

How Can I Delete Weebly Installation in Bluehost?

We are not sure why Bluehost does not offer the option for reverting back Weebly when direct Weebly free account has the option of un-publishing or deleting sites.

If you are in such a situation either installed Weebly on an existing WordPress site or wanted to revert back Weebly installation for using the domain for new WordPress then follow the below instructions:

Using cPanel File Manager

• Log in to your Bluehost hosting account, go to “cPanel” and open “File Manager” as shown in the below picture.

• Choose your WordPress installation directory and click on “Go” button.

Ensure to tick the checkbox “Show Hidden Files (dotfiles)” to view your .htaccess file.

• Look for index.html file and delete it.

• Select .htaccess file and then click on “Edit” or “Code Editor” button.

• Ensure to select “utf-8” for character encoding. It is recommended to download the backup of your .htaccess file before editing as shown in the warning.

• Delete all the content between #Weebly Additions Start and #Weebly Additions End.
• Save your changes.

Now open your site in a browser and you should be seeing your WordPress site now.

Alternate Way to Edit .htaccess

You need to be careful in choosing the character encoding and modifying the content of .htaccess file. If you are not familiar or comfortable with editing the file then there is an easy way to do that right from WordPress dashboard.

• Once you deleted the “index.html” file, login to your WordPress admin dashboard and install “Yoast SEO” plugin.
• Activate the plugin and navigate to “SEO > Tools” section and click on “File Editor” option.
• You can see .htaccess file content and delete all the content between #Weebly Additions Start and #Weebly Additions End.

• Update the file by clicking “Save changes to .htaccess”.

You can also use any other plugins for updating .htaccess file.

Using FTP

If you are not interested in installing plugin to edit .htaccess file or using “File Manager” in cPanel then the other option is using FTP.

• Open FTP client and connect to your Bluehost FTP server account.
• Navigate to your root directory and delete index.html file.
• Edit .htaccess file and delete the content between #Weebly Additions Start and #Weebly Additions End.
• Ensure to select the option for showing hidden files as shown below for FileZilla otherwise you may not be seeing .htaccess file.

• Re upload the modified .htaccess file to server.

Now you will be able to open your WordPress site.

Though deleting index.html and modifying .htaccess is enough, your root directory will still have many other Weebly installation files. If you are familiar with Weebly site structure it will be easy to delete those files as well or else you can just leave them.