If you choose to delete or disable the Thrive Architect plugin from your WordPress website, the Thrive Architect created content will not be visible on your website anymore, but it will still be saved in your WordPress database. More specifically, in the database, your content is found in the post meta fields.
This is normal behavior since Thrive Architect is the only plugin that can render the content created with it.
However, there shouldn’t be any reason why you should delete or disable Thrive Architect, because even if you choose to cancel your Thrive Suite Membership and install a different editor, you will still be able to have our plugin installed and the content will still be visible.
To learn more about this issue, click the following link to find out what happens when you cancel your membership. However, since all of your Thrive Architect created content is saved in your database, if you disable the plugin and then enable it again, all the content created with our plugin will be visible again.
You can find even more information, detailed by Shane in the following blog post: The Content Lock-In Problem: What Happens With Your Thrive Architect Content if You Delete the Plugin?
Important Things to Remember
-
All versions of Thrive Architect are backward compatible. As long as you have a version of Thrive Architect installed on your site, then your content will be displayed.
-
The data is stored in the database. If you remove the plugin from your site then, by default, the content will disappear. However, your content is never deleted from the database and a simple development task could be created to render this content in the front end even without Thrive Architect installed.
-
Even if you cancel your membership, all the content created using Thrive Architect will remain. You won’t be able to add or edit content using Thrive Architect any longer.
-
There are no adverse speed effects of having Thrive Architect installed on your website. We only load scripts and style sheets on content that has been created with Thrive Architect. With this in mind, even if you decide not to use Thrive Architect, you can leave it silently active on your site without any negative consequences for content created in the future.
-
Even if the company disappeared tomorrow, your existing version of Thrive Architect would render all content on your site in the future without any issues or negative consequences whatsoever.
Why Have We Built it Like This?
In 2014, we were the first company to release a fully live front-end visual editor. At that point, the technology we were using wasn’t compatible with the TinyMCE editor that came shipped with WordPress. The sheer number of conflicts and incompatibilities left us with no choice but to separate the content.
Our Plans Going Forward
Having listened to feedback from you, our customers, we are working on improving our front-end editor so that it plays nicely with the latest version of the WordPress editor. Of course, this is no easy task, but it’s certainly on our radar and something that we are investing quite considerable time and effort to achieving.