Why Should I Clean my Site Periodically?
Your WordPress site will be rather lightweight when you first develop it. The size of your site will rise as you add more files, data, content, plugins, and themes.
When someone needs to access your website, this is very significant since the amount of data that has to be processed determines how long it will take to load and perform important services. The experience of your users will be severely harmed by a bloated site’s poor loading times. The strains on the back end may also make managing your site more challenging.
It’s vital to spend some time cleaning up your site because of this. You can significantly increase the efficiency of your site by purging data and content, optimising images and files, and other actions. You can conduct maintenance operations concurrently, such as looking for broken links and ensuring sure everything is current.
Your site and the mechanisms you have in place will determine how frequently you clean. Larger sites with more regular content updates will inevitably have more bloat that needs to be removed.
Remove Unneeded Themes and Plugins
In WordPress, plugins and themes are great tools. Typically, you’ll occasionally find yourself adding dozens to your website. However, if you don’t actually need all of them, this could put undue load on your website.
You need to go through the themes and get rid of those you aren’t utilising right now. Instead of deactivating them, keep in mind to remove each one. You should go through your plugins and get rid of those that you don’t actually require.
Make Sure Everything is Up-To-Date
The secret to making sure your site functions properly and operates effectively is to keep all of your software, themes, and plugins updated. Older software versions might slow down operations, introduce security flaws, and cause compatibility issues with other tools.
The updating procedure is pretty easy. Simply navigate to the Plugins and Themes areas of your WordPress dashboard, search for anything that has a message about needing to be updated, and click Update Now.
Clear out Unused Images
Users frequently upload numerous graphics and photographs to their website but never use them. If you discover that your website contains a lot of unnecessary graphics, you should go through and remove them.
If the storage space on your server is restricted, you can relocate the undesirable images to a folder in your WordPress folder on your hard drive, give it a name like backupimage, and store them there.
Fix Broken Links
Some of the most important cleanup chores put more of an emphasis on improving the performance of your site than on providing a positive user experience. As a result of content being relocated or removed, for instance, some links may stop working over time. These broken links can frustrate your site’s users and jeopardise its dependability.
You can first manually tidy up your links. Every page’s content needs to be reviewed, each link clicked, and the links that don’t connect to valid pages need to be changed. This method has the advantage of giving you the opportunity to verify that each of your links is accurate, but it takes more time.
You might also add a plugin like Broken Link Checker. This application will automatically check your website and let you know if it finds any broken links.
Optimize Your Database
Overhead is a problem that might develop over time in your WordPress database. A defragmented hard drive is comparable to this state. You can use plugins like WP-Sweep and WP-Optimize to optimise your database.
