Removing Booked, and your data

What deleting the plugin actually destroys — read before you click.

There are two very different ways to stop using Booked, and only one of them is safe. Deactivating leaves everything where it is. Deleting runs a clean-up routine that empties Booked out of your database — every appointment, every customer, every note. This article is short on purpose. Read it before you touch the Plugins screen.

Deactivating is safe. Deleting is not.

Both actions live on the same row of the WordPress Plugins screen, seconds apart.

Deactivate switches Booked off. The Booked item disappears from your WordPress menu and your booking page stops taking appointments — with the plugin off, WordPress no longer recognises the booking shortcode, so the page prints it as plain text where the form used to be. Nothing is removed. Every booking, customer, service, location and member of staff stays exactly as it was. Switch it back on and your business is untouched.

Delete is the destructive one. WordPress removes the plugin's files and, on its way out, Booked runs its own clean-up routine. That routine drops twenty-one database tables. There is no trash, no soft delete and no undo. WordPress does put a warning in front of you — because Booked ships a clean-up routine, its confirmation page lists the plugin with the words will also delete its data and asks Are you sure you want to delete these files and data? — but it never says what that data is. This article does.

• 1Deactivate — the safe one. Booked stops running and vanishes from your menu, but not a single row of data is touched. This is what you want for a pause, a refit, or handing the site to a developer.
• 2Delete — WordPress only offers this once a plugin is deactivated, so it appears in this spot on the Booked row after step 1. Pressing it removes the files and drops Booked's twenty-one database tables. This is the point of no return.

What deleting destroys

The clean-up routine does not pick and choose. It drops all twenty-one tables in one pass, with nothing exported first and nothing held back:

• Every booking — past, today and future, with its price, status, reference and the customer name, email and phone copied onto it.
• Every customer record — names, email addresses, phone numbers and status.
• Every note, on customers and on bookings alike, and every document record.
• Your whole catalogue — services and categories, with their durations, prices, buffers and staff rules.
• Every location and every member of staff, along with opening hours, special days, special hours and booked time off.
• Your notification templates — including any wording you rewrote for confirmations and reminders.
• The activity log — the audit trail of who changed what and when, which is often the last surviving record of anything.

It also strips Booked's permissions from your administrator accounts and removes the Employee role Booked added. That part is harmless: reinstalling puts them back.

What survives — and why it is not a rescue

The clean-up is thorough about the tables that hold your business and careless about everything else. Your settings stay, your uploaded files stay, and thirteen of Booked's smaller tables are not on the drop list at all. None of what is left amounts to a copy of your business.

That last row deserves a second look. Your money is safe; the link between a payment and an appointment is not. Payments are matched to bookings by reference, so once the bookings table is gone a reference like GB-00042 points at nothing. If a customer queries a charge months later, or their bank raises a dispute, you will have no record of what was booked, when it happened or who delivered it — and that record is precisely the evidence a challenge is built from.

Take a copy first

Booked has no export. There is no CSV button on Bookings or Customers, and Booked does not register with WordPress's own personal-data export and erasure tools, so those will find nothing either. That leaves a database backup, or copying things out by hand. Do both.

1. Take a full database backupThrough your host's control panel or your backup plugin. This is the only thing that can bring bookings and customers back. Check the file actually downloaded, and that its size looks sensible, before going further.
2. Save what you will need to read againOpen Bookings and leave the All chip selected, so nothing is filtered out — the others are Pending, Confirmed, Completed, Cancelled and No-show, and it is the pending ones people forget. Copy the list into a spreadsheet or print it, then do the same on Customers. A database backup is no use for looking someone up next Tuesday.
3. Download the documents you must keepOpen each customer record and save the files from its Documents card. Anything collected through screening or intake sits on the booking instead, in that booking's own Documents section — press View on a file to open it in a new tab, then save it from there. There is no bulk download for either.
4. Settle any money still outstandingIssue refunds you owe from Settings › Payments › Your money, where each row carries its own Refund button, while the transaction list is still in front of you. If a dispute is live, a Chargebacks & disputes card appears further down the same tab — answer it with Respond before you go. That card is not shown at all until you have had a dispute, so its absence is normal. Once the plugin is gone, so are both panels.
5. Deactivate, check, then deletePress Deactivate first and let the page reload. Visit your booking page and confirm the rest of the site still behaves. The Delete link only appears once Booked is deactivated, so this order is forced on you anyway — use the gap.

Moving site, or changing domain

The commonest reason people reach for Delete is a move — staging to live, or an old domain to a new one. Deleting is the wrong tool for that, and it costs you the data for nothing. It does not free the licence either. Your key is locked to a single domain at a time, and that lock is held on your Booked account rather than on the site you are deleting.

Remove from this site, on Settings › Your plan, clears the key out of this WordPress install and sends the site back to the activation screen. That is all it does. The domain stays claimed, so typing the same key into the new site and pressing Activate is refused with This licence is already in use on bramhallpharmacy.co.uk. Ask us to move it if you have changed domains.

Do this instead. Open your Booked account — the Visit Booked link at the foot of the Licence tab goes straight there — find the licence under Your licences and press Change domain. Enter the new web address, or leave the box blank to unlock the key so it can be activated anywhere. Then enter the key on the new site and press Activate.

• 1Locked to — the one domain this key currently works on. If the address here is not the site you are standing on, Booked will not run.
• 2Remove from this site — takes the key out of this WordPress install and nothing more. It acts immediately, with no Save settings needed, and it leaves your bookings and customers completely alone. It does not release the domain: that is done from your Booked account, with Change domain.