How to delete your Wattpad account permanently

By Otabek Mamadaliev · Sources last reviewed 21 August 2026 · What this means

Copy your stories out chapter by chapter. Wattpad has no export-everything button, so writers with long works face a genuinely tedious job — and it is the only chance. Drafts go too, including things you never published.

If people read your work

Readers lose access the moment the account goes, mid-story if you are still writing. If a work has an audience, consider posting a final note before you delete rather than vanishing — it costs nothing, and it is the difference between an ending and an abandonment.

Before you delete

• Copy every published chapter and draft into a document.
• Save anything you want from the comments. Your own comments stay on Wattpad but are anonymised, so they will no longer be findable as yours.
• Cancel Wattpad Premium so billing stops.
• Note your reading lists — the books you were following are not recoverable as a list.

Close your account

Desktop web only. Wattpad does not offer account closure in the app or in a mobile browser — you need a regular computer.

1. Sign in on the Wattpad website on a desktop computer.
2. Open Settings.
3. Choose to close your account and confirm with your password.

It is reversible for about six months

Closing is not the one-way door this page used to describe. For roughly six months you can reopen the account by simply logging back in, and your profile, stories and reading lists come back with it.

After about six months — provided you have no active subscription and no purchased Coins on the account — it is permanently closed, no longer retrievable, and all its data is purged.

Your username is the thing that can strand you. Closing the account gives it up, and if someone else registers it while you are away, the account cannot be reopened at all. If there is any chance you will come back, that is the risk to weigh — not the data.

While the account is closed

• Your profile, stories and reading lists: no longer publicly available.
• Your comments: they stay on Wattpad, anonymised.
• Accounts you follow: you disappear as a follower, so their follower counts drop.

Backing up your stories, chapter by chapter

Wattpad has no bulk export, which makes this the most tedious backup on the site and the one most likely to be skipped. For a novel of forty chapters it is genuinely an afternoon's work, and there is no shortcut worth trusting.

1. Work from your own story pages in a desktop browser, copying each chapter into a document as you go.
2. Keep the chapter order and titles — reassembling a book from unlabelled files later is worse than the copying was.
3. Do the drafts and unpublished parts too. They go with the account and they are usually the ones with no other copy.
4. Save your cover images at full size.
5. Screenshot the reader comments that mattered to you. They are anonymised rather than deleted, but they stop being findable as yours, and for a lot of writers that response is the record of what the work meant to people.

Be careful with third-party downloader tools. Sites and scripts offering to grab a whole Wattpad account usually want you to log in through them. Handing your credentials to an unknown service to save an afternoon of copying is a bad trade — and if the stories are yours, you already have the right to them by hand.

What deletion does not fix

If the reason you are closing is that a story is being copied or reposted elsewhere, closing your account makes that worse rather than better. The reposts stay up, and the original — the one with your name and your publication date on it — is the copy that disappears.

The version with a timestamp and an author attached is the evidence that the work is yours. Keep it live, make the account private if you need to, and take the reposts up with the sites hosting them.

Same reasoning applies to the username. Six months of grace is generous, but the handle is claimable the whole time, and a taken username makes the reopening impossible rather than merely awkward. If you might come back, log in occasionally instead of closing.