How to Remove Website from Google Analytics

Need to clean up your Google Analytics account? Whether it's an old test site, a project you’ve sold, or a client you no longer manage, removing a website property keeps your workspace tidy and focused. This guide will walk you through exactly how to remove a website from Google Analytics 4, what happens to your data when you do, and what you need to do beforehand.

Why Bother Removing a Website from Google Analytics?

You might wonder if it’s worth the effort to delete old properties. Letting them sit there doesn't really harm anything, right? While true, tidying up your account has several practical benefits that make it a worthwhile five-minute task.

Keep Your Account Organized: The most obvious benefit is simple organization. Over time, your account can become cluttered with properties from staging sites, defunct projects, or old versions of your website. Removing them makes it much easier to navigate and find the active properties you actually care about.
Prevent Confusion and Errors: Having multiple similar-looking properties (e.g., "mysite.com" vs. "My Site - OLD") can lead to mistakes. A team member might accidentally pull a report from the wrong property or analyze outdated information. A clean account minimizes the risk of these simple but potentially impactful errors.
Improve Focus: A cluttered analytics environment is distracting. By removing irrelevant properties, you and your team can focus your attention on the data that matters for your current business goals. It's about reducing noise to find the signal more easily.
Maintain Data Privacy and Security: If you've sold a website or business, removing the property from your account is a crucial step. This ensures you no longer hold onto its historical data and prevents any accidental access. It's a clean break that’s good practice for both you and the new owner.

Property vs. Data Stream: What Are You Actually Deleting?

Before you click any buttons, it’s helpful to understand the structure of Google Analytics 4. Knowing the difference between an account, a property, and a data stream ensures you delete the right thing.

Think of it like a filing cabinet:

The Account: This is the entire filing cabinet. It's the highest level in the hierarchy and holds all your various website and app properties. You might have one account for your business that contains multiple properties.
The Property: This is a drawer in the cabinet. A property represents a single website or app you are tracking. For example, mybusiness.com would be one property, and your company's mobile app would be another. When you say you want to "remove a website," you almost always mean you want to delete a property. Deleting the property will erase all the data reported to it.
The Data Stream: This is a folder within a drawer. A data stream is the source of data flowing into a property. A single GA4 property can have multiple data streams. For instance, you could have one data stream for your website (www.mybusiness.com), another for your iOS app, and a third for your Android app, all feeding data into the same property for a consolidated view.

Most of the time, your goal will be to delete an entire property. However, if you simply wanted to stop tracking, say, an old version of a mobile app but keep tracking the website, you might only need to delete the specific data stream, not the whole property. For this guide, we'll focus on removing the entire property (the "drawer").

Before You Delete: A Quick but Important Checklist

Moving a property to the trash can is easy, but it's a permanent action once the grace period ends. Run through this quick checklist before you proceed to avoid any regrets later.

1. Back Up Your Historical Data

This is the most critical step. Once a property is permanently deleted from Google Analytics, all of its historical data is gone forever. There is no undelete button after the 35-day trash can period. If you think you might ever need to reference this data — for end-of-year reports, historical comparisons, or just for your archives — you must export it now.

You have a few options for backing up your data:

Export to Google Sheets: You can export individual reports to Google Sheets using the "Share this report" icon (three connected dots) at the top right of any report and selecting "Download File" & "Download CSV". This gives you raw data you can analyze later.
Download PDFs: For saving visual representations of dashboards or key reports, downloading them as PDFs is a quick and easy way to preserve the look and feel of your analysis. Use the same "Share this report" menu and select "Download PDF".
Use the Google Analytics API: For more advanced users or those with massive amounts of data, using the API to pull data into a database or a tool like BigQuery is the most robust solution.

Don't skip this. Take a few minutes to save your most important reports. You’ll thank yourself later if you ever need them.

2. Confirm You Have the Right Permissions

You can't delete a property unless you have the right access level. To move a property to the trash can, you need to have an Adminstrator or Editor role for the property. If you have "Viewer" or "Analyst" permissions, the option to delete will be greyed out or won't appear at all. You can check your permissions by going to Admin > Account Access Management or Admin > Property Access Management.

3. Inform Your Team Members

If you're part of a team, give everyone a heads-up before you delete a shared property. Someone else on your marketing, sales, or product team might still be using that historical data for their own reports. A quick message like, "Hey team, I'm planning to delete our old staging site property a week from now. Please let me know if you need to export any data from it before then," can prevent a lot of headaches.

Step-by-Step Guide: How to Move a Property to the Trash Can

Okay, you've backed up your data and you're ready to go. The process is straightforward and takes just a few clicks. Follow these steps to move your GA4 property to the trash can.

Step 1: Navigate to the Admin Section

Log in to your Google Analytics account. In the bottom-left corner of the screen, you'll see a gear icon labeled Admin. Click on it to go to the settings panel.

Step 2: Select the Correct Account and Property

The Admin screen has two main columns: Account and Property. First, make sure you've selected the correct account from the dropdown menu in the "Account" column. Then, in the "Property" column, use a dropdown menu to select the specific property you want to remove. Triple-check that this is the right one - you don't want to accidentally delete an active site!

Step 3: Open Property Settings

With the correct property selected, look under the "Property" column for the Property details link. Click on it.

Step 4: Move to Trash Can

In the top-right corner of the Property details screen, you'll see a blue button that says Move to Trash Can. Click it.

Step 5: Confirm the Deletion

A confirmation screen will appear, warning you about what you're about to do. It will remind you that the property will be permanently deleted after a grace period. Read it carefully, then click the blue Move to trash button to confirm.

That's it! Your property and all its associated data are now in the trash can, scheduled for permanent deletion.

What Happens Next? Understanding the Trash Can Grace Period

When you "delete" a property in GA4, it's not gone instantly. Google gives you a safety net. The property is moved to a Trash Can, where it will stay for 35 days.

During this grace period:

Data collection stops for the property.
You can no longer see the property in your regular list or access its reports.
You have the option to restore the property and all its historical data.

After the 35 days are up, the property and all its data are permanently and irreversibly deleted from Google's servers. At this point, there's no way to get it back. This 35-day window is your final chance to change your mind.

Oops, I Made a Mistake! How to Restore a Property

If you've had a change of heart or deleted the wrong property by mistake, you can easily restore it within the 35-day window.

Navigate to the Admin section again.
In the "Account" column, click on Trash Can.
You'll see a list of any properties that are currently awaiting deletion. Find the one you want to restore.
Select the property by ticking the checkbox next to it and click the Restore button.

The property will be moved back into your active list, and all its historical data will be reinstated, just as it was before.

Don't Want to Delete? Just Stop Collecting Data Instead

Sometimes, your goal isn't to erase a website's historical data forever — you just want to stop tracking its future activity. This might be the case for a temporarily paused project or a site you're about to redesign.

In this situation, you don't need to delete the property at all. The simpler solution is to remove the Google Analytics tracking code from your website.

Simply locate the GA4 tracking script (it starts with G-) or the Google Tag Manager container snippet in your website's code — usually in the <head> section of every page — and delete it. Once removed, your site will no longer send data to Google Analytics, but the property and all its valuable historical data will remain safe and sound in your account for future reference.

Final Thoughts

Removing an old website property from Google Analytics is a straightforward way to keep your account organized and focused. By confirming your permissions, backing up essential historical data, and navigating to Property Details in the Admin panel, you can confidently tidy up your workspace in just a few clicks.

Keeping an analytics account clean is a great first step, but the real goal is to make data analysis less of a chore. If you find yourself jumping between different platforms like Google Analytics, Shopify, and your ad accounts just to get simple answers, there's a better way. We built Graphed to be your AI data analyst. You can connect all your marketing and sales data in one place, and then use plain English to ask questions like, "Which campaigns are driving the most revenue this month?" Graphed builds the charts and dashboards for you in seconds, saving you from the hours of manual report-pulling.