Deactivating Tiger Booking changes nothing about your data. Deleting it removes its data only if you explicitly asked for that beforehand — and even then it never touches your pages or another plugin’s records. This article says exactly what goes and what stays.
Where: the opt-in is at WP Admin → Tiger Booking → Tools → Danger zone.
Deactivate versus delete
- Deactivate — the plugin stops running. Tables, bookings, customers, settings and pages all remain. Reactivating picks up exactly where you left off. Scheduled tasks are unscheduled.
- Delete — WordPress removes the plugin’s files and runs its uninstall routine. What that routine does depends entirely on one checkbox.
The one setting that matters
Under Tools → Danger zone there is a checkbox controlling whether deleting the plugin also removes its data. It is off by default, which means:
- Left unticked — deleting the plugin removes nothing but the files. Every table, booking, customer, setting and mirrored post survives, so reinstalling later brings your site straight back.
- Ticked — deleting the plugin also removes the data listed below, permanently.
Decide before you delete. Once the files are gone, so is the screen with the checkbox on it.
What is removed when you opt in
- The plugin’s database tables — bookings, services, staff, availability, customers, resources, locations and their links, intake questions and answers, reviews, coupons, waitlist entries, the audit log, shifts and settings, plus the tables of every installed engine. The list is taken from the plugin’s own schema and each installed module’s declared tables, so nothing added in a recent version is missed.
- Mirrored posts — the custom-post-type copies of services, hotels, rooms and so on that make them queryable by themes and widgets, along with their meta and revisions. These are deleted by post type, in batches, so a busy site does not time out.
- Options and transients — every setting the plugin writes, including the settings blob, schema version, portal role permissions, the self-service signing key, demo-seed markers, audit retention, cached portal sessions and rate-limit buckets.
- The private document directory in your uploads folder, where customer file uploads are kept.
- Scheduled events — the stale-booking sweep, audit-log pruning, licence refresh and webhook retries are all cleared, so WP-Cron is not left holding entries pointing at code that no longer exists.
On a multisite network the routine runs once per site, because the tables and options are per-site. Opting in on one site does not opt in the others.
What is never removed
- Your pages. The booking page and the thank-you page stay, even with the checkbox ticked. You may have edited them, and other things may link to them.
- Anything belonging to another plugin. Tiger Membership, Tiger Forms and Tiger LMS share a naming prefix, so the uninstall never sweeps by wildcard — every table, post type and option is named outright or derived from this plugin’s own registry.
- WordPress core data. No core option, no user account, no unrelated content.
Removing the Pro add-on
Tiger Booking Pro is a separate plugin, and deactivating it takes away the Pro surfaces and nothing else. No table is dropped and no row is deleted: hotel reservations, restaurant covers and payment records stay put and come back untouched if you reactivate. Your appointment data was never the add-on’s to begin with.
Two consequences worth planning for:
- With the add-on gone, its engines’ data is still in the database but has no screens. Export anything you need before removing it for good — Settings → Import / Export.
- Coupons and waitlist entries behave the same way: the tables are part of the core schema in every build, so the rows survive and become reachable again the moment the add-on returns.
Starting over without deleting
If what you actually want is a clean slate rather than an uninstall, Tools also offers demo-data seeding and clearing, and a data-repair scan. Clearing demo data removes only demo records and preserves everything real.
Troubleshooting
I deleted the plugin and my data is still there.
The clean-up checkbox was unticked, which is the default. Reinstall the plugin, tick it under Tools → Danger zone, then delete again.
I deleted the plugin and my data is gone.
The checkbox was ticked. There is no undo — restore from a backup.
My booking page is still on the site.
Intentional. Pages are yours, not the plugin’s, so uninstall leaves them alone. Delete them yourself if you no longer want them.
Will uninstalling Booking hurt my other Tiger plugins?
No. Everything removed is named or derived from Tiger Booking’s own registry, specifically so that sibling plugins sharing the prefix are never caught by it.