A good cleanup of the clutter around your office or home is always welcome. It’s always nice to have a clean space to work in. You’ll spend hours on your office and home, ensuring that the things that need to go are gone.
So, why is your WordPress site any different?
Your website’s WordPress performance can be drastically improved by taking the time to declutter it from top to bottom. Cluttered sites are slower and harder to read – you know, things you likely don’t want on your site. In this article, we’ll share with you 5 simple ways to get your WordPress site back in order and functioning beautifully.
Look For Unused Plugins
WordPress users know just how many plug-ins are available for download. For that reason, users can become plug-in hoarders very easily. Looking for these unused plug-ins is simple to do, yet many people don’t take the time to uninstall them as they lapse. By simply going to your plug-in page in WordPress, you can see exactly which plugins are being used and which ones aren’t. If you aren’t using them, deactivate them and discard them.
Delete Themes
The themes you use in WordPress are usually chosen as you create the site. Yes, you can shift your theme throughout your building process. With that said, for all intents and purposes, you will usually choose a parent theme and then use whatever child themes you create underneath that parent.
Because you only use the one theme, you will no doubt have a massive amount of themes simply taking up space in your WordPress. These themes can leave you vulnerable if they aren’t updated as well. For that reason, it’s important to select the themes you aren’t using and delete them.
Improve Site Navigation
Bloggers and content creators all want to put everything they do out into the aether. Because of this necessity to create, their WordPress sites can become cluttered with various category pages and subcategory pages within the previous pages. Having so many categories works from time to time, but more often than not the user and blogger will have little to no idea of what’s going on within the site. This hurts your SEO in the long run. Improving your site navigation will improve WordPress’ performance.
Go through your posts to see if there are topics you wrote about only a handful of times that can be condensed into a “Misc” category. There may be many subheadings that can be condensed as well. A clean sweep of your site navigation will help keep your site looking tidy.
Delete Post Revisions
One of the things that WordPress users are guilty of is revising their work time and again. This is a good thing! However, when left unchecked, these revisions can cause a serious backlog of clutter. Instead of hanging onto that really great second revision of your post from a month ago, you should simply let it go. Head to your draft folder and clear out anything you have already posted. There’s no need to hang onto those old first drafts anyway.
Clean Up Unused Media
Another thing that tends to crop up is media. Audio, photos, videos – these take up a large amount of space in WordPress, and can seriously slow down your performance. We realise that you just purged your plug-ins, but installing the Media Cleaner plug-in may be beneficial if you have a serious amount of media. You don’t want to have your site bogged down by old photos you don’t use or won’t use.
A Clean Site is a Faster Site
By using the tips and tricks mentioned in this article, you’ll be able to keep your site humming right along. Your WordPress performance will improve drastically if you purge the unused items. Once they’re gone, your site is sure to take off.