Cleaning Up Your WordPress Website: Advanced Techniques for Optimizing Performance and Improving Security

Benny May 18, 2023 0 comments

Deep cleaning WordPress websites? Like to learn how to clean up unwanted stuff, which is accumulated over the years of updates, in your WordPress website and make it fast loading and secure? Here you go:

WordPress is an incredibly powerful and versatile platform for creating CMS-driven websites. However, as your website grows, it can accumulate a lot of unwanted stuff that can slow down your website’s performance and pose security risks. In this blog post, we will discuss how to deep clean your WordPress website, shedding down unwanted plugins, cleaning up unused code, optimizing images, cleaning up the WordPress database, and more.

Assessing the website

Before you start cleaning up your WordPress website, it’s essential to assess its current state. You can use various tools and techniques to analyze your website’s performance, speed, and security. The first one we recommend is GTmetrix, which analyzes your website’s speed and suggests improvements. Next is to use security plugins like Wordfence or Sucuri to scan your website for malware and other vulnerabilities. To secure your website, Our choice is a bit different. We at Macronimous usually recommend iThemes. We have been using it for the last 6 years in several WordPress websites. It never failed. Additionally, you can also use the built-in WordPress tools like the site health check to check for any issues.

Shedding down unwanted plugins and themes

One of the best ways to speed up your website and improve its security is to remove any unused or outdated plugins and themes. If there are plugins which were installed just for testing purpose, do not leave them as deactivated. These unused elements can take up valuable resources and even pose a security risk if not updated regularly. There are thousands of plugins without developer support, and what is staying unused could be one of them. Therefore, it’s essential to keep only essential plugins and themes and remove the rest. So, Ask your WordPress developer to make a careful audit first.

To remove plugins and themes safely, first, deactivate them and then delete them. Deactivating a plugin will ensure that any settings and data related to the plugin are not lost. You can deactivate plugins from the WordPress dashboard by navigating to Plugins, selecting the plugin you want to deactivate, and clicking Deactivate. To delete a plugin, click on the Delete link that appears after deactivating the plugin.

Cleaning up unused code and images

Unused code and images can increase your website’s load time and affect its performance. Therefore, it’s important to find and remove unnecessary code and images from your website. The unused code could be Custom code snippets, Theme files, custom JavaScript or CSS files, Widgets and widget areas, Shortcodes, or Deprecated functions or hooks. (We will write a separate blog on this and link it here soon!).

To find unused code, you can use plugins like WP Sweep and WP Optimize. These plugins can help you identify and remove unused code from your website’s database safely. Additionally, you can use the WordPress built-in editor to remove unused code from your website’s theme files.

To find and remove unused images, you can use plugins like WP-Optimize and Imagify. These plugins can scan your website for unused images and remove them safely.

Optimizing images

Images can significantly impact your website’s load time. Therefore, it’s absolutely essential to optimize your images for the web. There are various ways to optimize your images, either by ways of compressing them, resizing, or manage effectively by using lazy loading methods.

Further on, these are mentioned below:

To compress your images, you can use plugins like Smush and Imagify. These plugins can compress your images without affecting their quality.

Additionally, you can resize your images to reduce their file size further.

Lazy loading is another technique to improve your website’s speed by delaying the loading of images until they’re needed. You can use plugins like Lazy Load by WP Rocket and A3 Lazy Load to implement lazy loading on your website.

Cleaning up the WordPress database

The WordPress database stores all the data related to your website, including content, settings, and plugin data. Over time, unused plugin data can slow down the database and affect your website’s performance. Therefore, it’s essential to clean up the WordPress database regularly.

To clean up the WordPress database, you can use plugins like WP-Optimize and WP Sweep. These plugins can scan your database for unused data and remove it safely. Additionally, you can optimize your database by removing spam comments, trashed posts, and revisions.

Now, it is time to conclude.

Deep cleaning your WordPress website can significantly improve its performance, speed, and security. By shedding down unwanted plugins and themes, cleaning up unused code and images, optimizing images, and cleaning up the WordPress database, you can make sure that your website is fast loading and secure. Regularly maintaining your website will not only improve its performance and security, but also enhance your visitors’ experience. We hope this blog post helps you deep clean your WordPress website and provides valuable insights into maintaining a clean and optimized website.

We are a WordPress development company in India. And, we have a team of expert WordPress developers, and if you need professional support, feel free to contact us.