Spring is coming, and soon it’s the season for gardening, too. It’s the perfect opportunity to take a moment to clean up your WordPress site, before the clutter turns it into a jungle! In this blog post you’ll find a comprehensive guide to clean up your WordPress, and learn all the benefits it brings.
Why It’s Important to Keep Your WordPress Clean
By cleaning up WordPress you’ll optimize your site’s performance and improve its security. And believe it or not – in the end it’s better for the environment too.
As each site is different, your mileage may vary, but here we’ll go through the most common pain points and causes that may end up cluttering your WordPress site, and which have the potential to cause website slowness or vulnerabilities.
Before we begin, always remember to back up your WordPress site before making any changes and removing files! In case something goes wrong, your site can be restored easily. At Seravo, your entire WordPress site is backed up automatically on a daily basis. What’s more, you can restore the backup yourself, or we can do it for you – free of charge.
Cleaning up your WordPress site takes care of its performance, security and is better for the environment, too.
Clutter Culprits: Identify What to Clean Up
Less data to transfer means reduced loading time, and your site will load faster.
So what kind of things should you be on the lookout for when cleaning up WordPress? The most common unused or unneeded areas that may end up slowing your site include:
- Unoptimized Database
- Media Library
- Plugins and Themes
- WordPress Users
First, let’s take a look at what kind of unnecessary information may be stored in the database of your WordPress site.
Unoptimized Database
A WordPress database contains all kinds of information related to your site. It may get cluttered due to post revisions, spam comments or orphaned metadata, which are most likely not essential for the everyday operations of your website.
When editing a post or a page in WordPress, any changes are automatically stored in post revisions, so that your post can be reverted to an earlier version, if need be. In Seravo’s WordPress hosting, the amount of post revisions has been limited to 30 by default. You can freely change this setting, and even further optimize and restrict the amount of revision your site stores.
When your site is hosted at Seravo, you can use the Seravo Plugin to easily optimize and clean up any excess database cruft and transients. Just log in to your WordPress site, you’ll find the feature in the Tools > Database menu. Learn more about these features in Knowledge Bank.
Unmanaged Media Library
Duplicate files, files that are too large, images that are unused… Any media library gets cluttered as time goes on. So how do you identify those pesky duplicates and gigantic files before you can even dream about removing them?
As checking and comparing files manually can be a tedious task, it may be a good idea to leave the task up to a plugin. There are several free and paid plugins to choose from in the WordPress plugin directory, for example Media Deduper and Media Cleaner.
After removing duplicates, it’s a good idea to optimize the images that you want to keep, and Seravo Plugin can help you here as well. You can easily compress image files that are too large, or even strip image metadata in case your don’t need it. Learn more in our Knowledge Bank, and remember to check out our earlier post about next-gen image formats, if you’re interested in optimizing your images even further!
Unneeded Plugins and Themes
It’s always a good idea to go through all plugins and themes installed on your site and determine whether or not you still need them. Any unused, inactive plugins should be safe to remove from your site. View and manage all your plugins by logging in to WordPress and navigate to the Plugins menu.
By removing plugins and themes you no longer need, you’re also taking care of your site’s security. More about security in WordPress in the next chapter, so keep reading!
Unused WordPress User Accounts
As a site admin, you’re most probably inclined to remove any user logins that no longer should have an access to you site. However, while removing users, don’t remove the content they’ve uploaded to your site in the past! Assign the content to another user, unless you are 100% certain the content is no longer needed or used anywhere on your site. It’s a good idea to review any posts or media library content added by the user in the past.
Removing users that no longer need access to your site also prevents unauthorized access to your site.
Security Boost: Clean Up WordPress for a Safer Site
Cleaning up is not important only for performance, but also the security and integrity of your WordPress installation. Keeping your site lean and clean also keeps your site’s threat vector as small as possible.
Minimize WordPress Vulnerabilities
Less plugins means less code on your site, which means less opportunities for potential attackers to find weaknesses to exploit. This is the reason why additional security plugins may do the exact opposite of they’re supposed to do – they increase the amount of code on your site, and may include vulnerabilities themselves!
You should remove any outdated plugins that haven’t been updated for a while, as unmaintained plugins always carry a security risk. Consider if you can replace the plugin with an updated alternative, or if you can simply drop it completely.
WordPress User Account Security
As you go through user accounts, pay special attention to any admin accounts that lie dormant. If you’re hesitant to remove the user, consider limiting their access by selecting a different role for the user. Admin users have access to basically all parts and settings of your site, and it’s never a good idea to grant user with admin permissions, unless they’re actually needed.
About WordPress Backups and GDPR
Ensure your site doesn’t have extra backups lying around. This may be a violation of data removal request, if there’s an old and forgotten backup file just taking up disk space. You don’t want the backup being shared by accident in public, either!
At Seravo, your WordPress site is automatically backed up each day. These full backups include everything that’s needed to restore your site in any scenario. All backups can be used for 30 days at a time, so you don’t need to use any additional backup plugins, or worry about removing old backup files.
Additional Security Settings in Seravo Plugin
Looking to improve WordPress security in more detail? Check out all the additional security settings in Seravo Plugin. There you can block WordPress user enumeration and disable XML-RPC, for example.
Seravo protects your login page from brute-force attacks, but we also recommend using two-factor authentication and protecting it from bots with a captcha.
Don’t forget to protect your forms with a captcha, too! Find out which form plugin you’re using, and refer to its documentation to find out how to configure captcha with it.
Greener Web: Clean WordPress is Better for the Environment
Digital actions have a physical impact. The correlation between the digital world and the evironment around us may at first seem like a far-fetched connection, but all websites are stored on physical servers, located in data centers… Which consume energy just like any other facility.
Overloaded servers use more energy. When your site is optimized (thanks to your cleaning efforts), it reduces the resources and the energy the servers consume when they handle and transmit your data.
By choosing Seravo, you take a step towards a greener web. This is why our plans are based on the amount of HTTP requests – it’s a better indicator of whether or not your site is optimized. Seravo cares about the digital footprint of your site. If you’ve taken all the necessary steps to fine-tune your WordPress installation, it’s very likely that a smaller plan is suitable for hosting it. All our plans include our best core features, so by optimizing you’ll get access to a premium service for a lower price!
Cleaning Tools and Techniques for WordPress
Website maintenance is an ongoing process. While we at Seravo combine the hosting and manage your WordPress, the content and inner workings of your site are in your own hands. To make maintaining your site easier, schedule some time for going through these things on a regular basis!
We take care of backups, security, monitoring, logging and much, much more. Looking for a safe and green haven for your WordPress site? Get started with Seravo today!
Keep Your Digital Garden Healthy
Websites and networks form digital ecosystems. No matter the purpose and scope of your website – be it a personal inspiration blog or an online service with thousands of users – it makes sense to nurture your website and ensure it remains secure, performs well and uses the available resources wisely. Everyone benefits from a clean WordPress installation, from business owners and admins to developers and end-users.
What are your own tips and recommendations for keeping your site clean? Let us know in the comments!
What is a Digital Garden?
Instead of the traditional and linear blogs and social media, the term digital garden refers to an online space that’s dynamic and constantly evolving. It connects your ideas, letting them grow as you expand them.
Digital gardens may be built and nurtured by individuals or communities. Wikis are good examples of digital gardening, in which ideas and topics are expanded and connected. Wikipedia is the prime example – and it’s a very lush jungle, in fact!
WordPress is versatile, and it can be turned into a wiki, a knowledge bank or your personal digital garden with ease. Seravo’s WP Start is a perfect place to start to get started with your own content!