See now some great tips for cleaning up your WordPress website: One of the most significant advantages of WordPress (WP) is the plethora of plugins you can choose from and the number of themes (both free and premium) that you can decide to use. The problem with this, however, is that, over time, things might change. The more plugins you add, the more resources your website draws to work. Moreover, not all themes are well optimized; for some, it may take a bit longer to notice this.
Cleaning Up Your WordPress Website
Apart from this, posting images and videos on your WordPress website is something anyone can do, even for people who know nothing about image optimization. Your efforts to optimize your website, add value, or simply make it more functional may backfire horribly.
To this, some people respond by starting a new website that is expensive and neglectful to all the work you’ve invested in your current site. Luckily, even the worst situations can be salvageable with the right attitude. With this in mind, here are several tips for cleaning up your WP website.
1. Remove all inactive plugins
In the introduction, we mentioned that you might not be using all of your plugins. Fortunately, you won’t have to pick through your brain to make a selection. When you go to the admin site and click on Plugins, you have a sub-category called inactive, where all the plugins currently not in use are placed. It is entirely safe to remove all of these.
If you still feel the urge to do more, you could go to your active plugins and estimate if there are some of the plugins here that you currently aren’t using or simply aren’t using enough. However, remember that this action is not as safe, and your estimate might be a bit off cleaning up your WordPress website.
2. Update your WordPress
Another thing you have to do to keep your WordPress website functional is – to update it regularly. Remember that you must protect all your data before you get started, which is why you should back it up first. Once you have this out of the way, you can virtually update your website with a single click. This, nonetheless, is only possible in the newer versions of WP (2.7 and newer). As for the older versions, you need to do this manually.
On the other hand, this isn’t a complicated matter either. Afterward, you can go ahead and enable all of your plugins. It is also highly advisable to clear all your browser cookies. Skipping this step might result in some troubles while logging in and cleaning your WordPress.
3. Old posts might have to go as well
The next thing you need to reexamine is what to do with all of your website’s old posts. Sometimes, updating an old blog post might be a good idea. This is especially true if it was a post predicting something that became true in the future. You can most commonly return to the position in question and add some keywords, do a bit of deep linking to lure some new audience to the page, or simply update and reuse the post in question. So, a great way of cleaning up WordPress websites.
It might also be a good idea to lengthen the post a bit because nowadays, blog posts with 3000 words or more are all the rage. Still, not all posts are usable or reusable. Some of them have simply outlived their purpose. These posts you might want to delete for good.
4. Get some professional help
Of course, cleaning up your WordPress website is not necessarily something you have to do on your own. Outsourcing this task to web development might give you much better results. In this way, you get to keep the integrity of your website and ensure that your brand image remains intact if you translate your vision to your web developers, it might even see some improvement. Finally, you get a website optimized for UX (user experience) with much greater reliability.
5. Image optimization cleaning up your WordPress website
The next thing we’ve mentioned in the introduction is image optimization. Here, there are two issues to keep in mind. First, improperly optimized media will slow your website down quite a bit. Second, having too much of it can be just as bad.
Humans are visual beings and receive visual information about 60,000 times faster than verbal or textual ones. However, this doesn’t mean that you can just add photos everywhere. First, you want all your images hosted in the WordPress.com cloud. Second, you want the format of images to be either JPEG or PNG. Finally, you enjoy all the images compressed and optimized. All of this can be done effortlessly with the right set of plugins.
6. Fix broken links
Most importantly, you must fix all the broken links on your website. To start, you need some decent diagnostics. In other words, you need a broken link checker. Not only will this tool alert you if there are any broken links currently on your website, but also notify you in time if any of the links go wrong later on. Of course, cleaning these links manually is also a possibility. However, depending on the size of your domain, it can be an incredible endeavor, as it will require you to search every piece of content you’ve ever published manually.
Cleaning Up Your WordPress Website Conclusion
You must learn how to clean your WordPress website because this is something you will need regularly. No matter how diligent you are, links will not work, plugins will get old and old, and non-recyclable content will keep piling up. Fortunately, once you master this trick or find a reliable partner to handle it, this will become something you can do with ease.
Author bio: Aside from their primary area of interest and expertise in business consulting with Web design Sydney agency, Ian could also be a passionate sports fan and nature and photography enthusiast, always trying to keep up to date with tech innovations and development.
