Tech Debt – Move Your Stuff In. Take All Your Stuff Out.

There’s a special kind of tech debt that doesn’t look like tech debt—until it does. It’s the lint in the lint trap after you’ve already run the dryer; the box of cables you swear you’ll sort “later.” In WordPress, it shows up as leftover roles, orphaned capabilities, mystery options, phantom cron jobs, abandoned custom tables, and whole ghost towns of custom post types. You uninstall the plugin, the lights go out, and somehow the furniture is still there.

The poster child? WooCommerce. Not because it’s uniquely bad—it’s foundational, it’s ambitious, it’s everywhere—but because scale magnifies everything. Install Woo and friends sprawl out like a small city: roles (customer, shop_manager), capabilities (manage_woocommerce and cousins), options and transients with prefixes for days, scheduled tasks, order/post records, logs, webhooks—the works. Remove Woo and you should be able to choose what remains. Instead, site owners are left picking through rubble with a headlamp and a broom plugin.

This isn’t a call to salt the earth. Data can and often should persist. Sometimes reinstalling is part of the workflow; sometimes you don’t want to destroy orders, products, or analytics. That’s fine. But choose. Give us a clear, respectful uninstall that asks, “Want me to tidy up?” and then actually does it.

The Mess, Named

Let’s define terms so the ghosts have faces:

• Roles: special user categories. When a plugin goes, the roles it added should either go with it or be deliberately kept—your call.
• Capabilities: granular permissions. These are the gremlins that cling to users even after the role goes away. The infamous bbp_keymaster capability is a perfect example. Capability stamped, plugin gone, cap still hanging out like a forgotten VIP wristband.
• Options & Transients: the junk drawer. Config flags, caches, feature toggles—useful while the plugin lives, pointless when it dies.
• Cron Jobs: invisible alarms that keep ringing after the house is empty.
• Custom Tables / CPTs: heavier furniture. Sometimes you keep them. Sometimes you don’t. But don’t force it.
• User Meta: little stickers on people’s accounts. Fine during the party, awkward when everyone’s gone home.

Individually, none of these will crash your site. Together, they erode trust. They make backups heavier, migrations weirder, and debugging slower. They waste time. And time is the only currency that actually matters.

The Part That Stings

It would be easy to fix.

WordPress gives developers everything they need: an uninstall.php file, register_uninstall_hook, APIs to remove roles, strip capabilities, delete options, clear cron, drop tables, and, crucially, ask the site owner first. A single settings toggle—“Keep data on uninstall?”—solves the re-install use case without littering on everyone else’s lawn.

The hard part isn’t code. It’s care. Caring enough to treat the end of the plugin’s life as part of the product, not an afterthought. Caring enough to respect the people who made your plugin popular by not leaving them holding the bag.

The Walmart Problem

Imagine a store that shoves your cart at you on the way in—and kicks you on the way out. That’s what uninstall-with-residue feels like. Users are not a nuisance to be managed; they are the oxygen. If thousands of non-technical site owners are asking the same question—“Why is this stuff still here after I delete your plugin?”—the correct answer is not “I won’t bore you with the reasons.” The correct answer is a button that tidies up.

A Better Contract

Here’s a sane baseline that honors both reinstallers and minimalists:

• On install: create what you need. Do it cleanly and namespaced.
• In settings: add an explicit “Keep data on uninstall?” toggle, default off for lightweight plugins, default on (with clear warnings) for heavy commerce/data apps.
• On uninstall: if the user opts in, remove plugin-specific roles, strip plugin-specific caps from users, delete options/transients/prefix meta, unschedule cron, drop plugin tables, and, if requested, remove plugin CPT content. Log what you did so people have a record.
• On documentation: one page called “Uninstall & Cleanup,” with bulletproof steps and exact names (roles, caps, options, tables). No coyness. No mystery.

This is not punitive. It’s professional. It’s what durable software looks like.

Why This Matters (Even If You Don’t Think It Does)

Because every ounce of ambiguity you leave behind becomes someone else’s support ticket. Because backups and restores are only as predictable as the data model. Because migrations are a reality, not an edge case. Because performance budgets exist. Because every WordPress administrator you save ten minutes for will give you a five-star story in return.

And because open-source is, at its best, a culture of stewardship. If you build a new room onto the house, build the door back out, too.

The Quiet Fix We’re Already Doing

Site owners are writing their own brooms: utility plugins that remove roles, strip capabilities, clean options, unschedule cron, and wipe CPTs when they’re truly done. That shouldn’t be necessary. But until uninstall grows up across the ecosystem, it’s the seatbelt we clip before merging back into traffic.

Here’s the ask, from one builder to another: move your stuff in; take your stuff out. Give us the choice, make it obvious, and then honor that choice with real cleanup. Not because users are fussy, but because they’re the reason your work matters at all.

A little care at the exit buys an immense amount of goodwill. And on the web—where trust evaporates faster than a transient—that goodwill is everything.