how to clean you wordpress website

How to clean up your WordPress website

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How to clean up your wordpress website is easire than you might think. And also extremely important for a better performing website. WordPress is a cost-effective, secure, flexible, SEO-friendly, W3C compliant, and mobile-friendly content management system (CMS). It is no wonder that it has become the favourite development software of all its users. Today, WordPress is the most popular website management software. WordPress has a 40% market share of all websites on the internet.

As you use a WordPress site, you upload vast amounts of content to the website. Similarly, you also use different types of themes and plug-ins to make the website better. Moreover, your users visit and leave their impressions on the website as well.

So, all of these and other similar things make your WordPress website cluttered, resulting in a slow and sluggish performance by the site. The website will lose its charm not only for you but also for your visitors. However, you don’t need to worry as there is a solution to this problem.

You can keep your WordPress website tidy by cleaning it up, which will result in better performance yields for your website. You will get a faster and easier to use website at the end of the clean-up operation. Interestingly, it doesn’t take too much time to clean up your WordPress website if you know what you need to do.

Keeping this in mind, here are some of the best ways you can use to clean up your WordPress website. These will be a great help in keeping your website tidy. So, let’s have a look at each way one by one.

Get Rid Of All The Unwanted Themes And Plugins

One of the reasons why WordPress has become such a famous website development platform is because of a large number of themes and plugins it has available to its users. You get more than 50 thousand unique and amazing plugins while using WordPress as your site builder.

Over time, you will want to try different themes and plugins according to your preference and what you require your site to do. We often forget to remove all our unwanted themes and plugins we are not using. This creates a sluggish website and 40 per cent of your users will leave your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Keeping unwanted plugins and themes on your WordPress website can overload the site and be a potential hack risk. So, it would help if you remembered to get rid of unwanted plugins and themes.

Delete Old Post Revisions

Old post revisions also take a lot of space on your WordPress website. If you let these revisions stockpile, you may be faced with unnecessary speed issues due to unwanted clutter. So, it’s best to clean up your WordPress website by deleting all your old post revisions. WordPress plugins such as WP Optimize can help clean up your site. This way, you will get lower post revision, which will make things less messy.

WP optimize plugin

Keep WordPress Up To Date

Your WordPress website must always have updated plugins, themes and core files. If you do not update your site, you will have a sluggish site with a sub-optimal experience.
Updates are important because they bring new features with them. Also, updates remove previously left bugs and security holes.

Some updates happen automatically. However, there are updates you have to do manually.
With WordPress, manually updating your website is very easy. You simply have to go to the Update section for core files and click on the “Update WordPress” option, and it’s done. Similarly, for plugins, go to the update section. Select the plugins that require an update and click on “Update plugins”. Always remember to back up your site before doing any updates. I recommend using WPVivid

Get Rid Of Unused Media Files

Often, when choosing the best content before the visitors get to your site, we try different media files. Similarly, you also have to try different image resolutions, sizes, and types to find that perfect look and feel. Now, this can result in a tone of media files sitting on your WordPress site, which have ended up not been used.

When carrying out a clean-up operation, you will need to get rid of all those unused media files. It will clean up your WordPress website and improve your website speed.

Another tip is to alway try and use optimized images. It will help you save a lot of space which essentially enhances the users’ experience on your website.

So, every time you upload an image on your WordPress site, remember to first compress it. Compressing an image is extremely easy. You can use a free tool such as Tiny PNG or Short Pixel, which is available online. It is also important to save your images in Webp format.

TinyPNG
shortpixel

Delete Spam Comments

If your website is interactive, and mainly if it includes blogs, spam comments can play a significant role in making your WordPress website untidy. Also, WordPress has made things easier for you. Most WordPress websites have the plugin, ‘Akismet‘, installed on them by default. This plugin stops all the spam comments from appearing on the front end of your website and filters all the spam comments to the spam folder. You should go to this folder and delete all the spam comments. Try to do this twice a month to keep your website free from clutter. Another great anti spam plugin is Clean Talk.

CleanTalk

Keep Your Content Under Review

Irrespective of the type of website, content is the king. Once in every 4-5 months, you try and review your WordPress website content. This will help you sift through the quality of your content and how the public interacts with it. You will see that some of your posts have good viewership, whereas some will have very little public interaction.
Here you can choose to delete unnecessary and irrelevant posts from your website. It will improve the overall content standards of your website and is another great way to clean up your website.

Keep Your WordPress Users Updated.

Often, you need several users to operate and manage content on a WordPress website. These users may change from time to time. In this respect, you should make sure that your website has a list of only active users. When you see that you have a lot of old users, it’s time to clean up.


Following the steps above is some of the easiest ways on how to clean up your WordPress website. Should you have anything to add to the above, I would love to hear about it.

My idea of a superwoman is someone who scrubs her own floors.

Bette Midler

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