Issue #8

4/12/2024

Spring Cleaning

Hello, librarians!

The advent of spring brings many images to mind: flowers and birdsong, doors and windows open to a soft breeze (on a good day), and clearing away that closed-in winter feeling.

Like your home and work spaces, your website can also benefit from a good cleaning - and like your garden and your library’s collection, can be improved by a bit of weeding!

Here's a short to-do list for your website.

Sharon Barnes

SCKLS Technology Consultant

Server Space

While SCKLS does not currently cap the amount of disk space any one website can use, practicing some restraint is good management.

Obviously, more active and full-featured sites will take up more space than sites with minimal content – the point is to keep and maintain the content and plugins you need, and let go of the unused stuff.

How much space does YOUR site take up? There’s not a good way to tell from the WordPress dashboard, but you can get a baseline from your backup size.

This will probably be about a third or half of the total disk space used by your site, but after some cleanup, the size of the next backup will be an indicator of how much space you have freed up.

First Things First

Before making major changes to your website, download the most recent backup! See WP Express Tips #3 for a quick refresher.

If you have made any changes since the date of the most recent backup, you may want to run another backup to include everything, and download that one.

Worst case scenario, if you find that you have deleted something that you can’t easily re-add, you will be able to restore the backup and start again.

Plugins

Delete all inactive plugins that you do not plan to use in the near future. If you don’t know what an inactive plugin was used for, it’s probably safe to delete it.

Keep in mind that SCKLS does require the use of several plugins for security and performance, so DO NOT deactivate or uninstall plugins that are on the Required Plugins list.

In the Plugins list on your dashboard, click the Inactive button, then delete each plugin you don't need.

If there are no inactive plugins, you're good - move on to the next step.

DO contact me if you have questions about any plugins! I’ll be happy to help you figure out their functions so you can make an informed decision about keeping them.

Posts

If you don't write posts on your website, skip to the next section!

You don’t need to delete older posts as a regular routine, but then you don’t need to keep years of them, either. Choose a time frame to keep (say, one year), and delete the rest!

Simply sort posts in reverse date order and move them to the Trash folder individually or in batches. Here's how:

Go to Posts and click on the Date column heading to list the newest one first, then click again to reverse the order and show the oldest posts.

If all of the posts on this page can go (and if they’re from several years ago, they probably can!), check the box next to the Title column heading to select all, then click Bulk Actions > Move to Trash and Apply.

Repeat until you come to posts you want to keep. Then don't forget to Empty Trash!

Images

Now for the biggest space-eater: images. But use some caution when deleting them - just because they’re old doesn’t mean they are not still in use.

Click on Media to see your library. If the thumbnail images are displayed in a grid, click on the layout icon just below the page title to switch. The list view may show if they are attached to an existing post or page, but ‘Unattached’ images could be in use elsewhere, such as in a sidebar or header. So if it’s an ‘evergreen’ image (still relevant), err on the side of caution and keep it.

If your site has been around a while, you may want to filter by time frame as shown in the screenshot below; otherwise, jump to the last page and start there.

There is an option to download individual images before deleting if you need a backup. Hover over the image title and Download file.

Click Delete Permanently to remove an image – there’s no Undo button for this! If you have whole pages of unneeded images, you can delete them a page at a time using the Bulk actions option, which works just the same as for posts.

When you're finished, run a fresh backup and then revel in the new lightness of your website!

As always, if you have any questions or concerns about your website,

please reach out to me at sharon@sckls.info.

If you have missed any previous issues, you can now read them online.

Sharon Barnes, SCKLS Technology Consultant

sharon@sckls.info

1-800-234-0529 x135