Everyone wants to conduct everything in their life under control and in a coherent manner. To keep it clean, you always remove unnecessary things from your home. The same applies to your workplace, especially if you are running a WordPress website for your business. To clean it, you should try to remove everything that is of no use.
Being accurate, users come to you to take advantage of some type of product or service, and they don’t really care about everything you put into it. So, your website should have a purpose and stay on it for every page. Putting irrelevant data with no reference to your niche is simply a useless effort, which is only degrading your brand value.
Steps to Clean Your WordPress Installation
There are various strategies that you can employ in your WordPress site so that it is user friendly and ultimately maximizes visitor engagement.
1. Remove unnecessary plugins
Although plugins are one of the most important elements in any WordPress site, keeping plugins that are not active or poorly coded can cost you on site speed which is not a smart move. Uninstall or deactivate only the plugins that you are not using.
Also, consider changing some of your existing plugins that serve multiple purposes (Jetpack is a great example of a single plugin that provides multiple functions). Pay attention to your needs and cut the list accordingly (do not become a plugin hoarder).
2. Make Navigation Unconnected
Give your navigation a clean look. Remove excessive categories and make sure to use appropriate parent and child categories for smooth search. To make sure you navigate your most important pages, you can use tags and category widgets to give your readers access to more content.
If your site requires multiple links, consider adding a mega menu. Mega Mains provides a large list of information to your site visitors, while allowing you to keep your main navigation simplified. Plugins like Uber Menus, Mega Menus Menus and Hero Menus offer superb mega menu capabilities that work wonderfully with most WordPress themes.
3. Organize Site Content
If your site has a lot of content, organize it in a structured way by bundling it into paragraphs. Also remember to use proper titles. Your posts and pages should have the title H1, and then you should use nested H2, H3, etc. within your post (our post uses the heading “Step up to clean your WordPress installation”, followed by each numeric point Contains H3 titles.). This improves readability and user experience by keeping visitors away from the unreadable wall of text.
Some emphasis on basic formatting can produce noticeable results. This includes using headers, lists, quotes, buttons, links, and even different font styles that help make the flow of your content more intuitive.
4. Keep a check on relevance
When using images, videos, or other media in a blog post of your WordPress site, it needs to be related to the topic. Also, you should not keep the media irrelevant to your point. Periodically updating old content and this related media is also a good way to make sure you don’t have any broken images or links.
5. Run regular updates
Be sure to keep your WordPress installations, themes and plugins updated. If you haven’t updated in a while, do it. The current version of WordPress is used to ensure that you are getting the latest security patches for WordPress as well as compatibility with plugins and themes for your website.
We always recommend that you make a backup of your WordPress site before updating. This is an important precaution when one of your plug-ins breaks when you update so you have a way to get your website back to its previous state. Consider making it one of the best backup services and plugins for WordPress to make backups easy.
6. Monitor Your Site Speed
If your site is taking too long to load, then you need to find out the reason that may be hindering its running smoothly. Phatt Tools is a great way to check the speed of your WordPress site.
Using fast website service is a good option for better website speed, but some people are also employed shared hosting as it provides great value for money. But never mind, always make sure to use a hosting plan that is sufficient for your web traffic – with shared hosting you are actively sharing your server’s resources with any other websites, and managed hosting With you are often given only one set amount. Be sure to select a plan that is right for you.
You should also pay attention to your theme and active plugins. Some WordPress add-ons (themes and plugins) are resource heavy (such as some large slider plugins) and those with poor code can definitely slow down your site. Test the site speed of the live theme demo before downloading and installing it, and research plug in before adding any new ones.
7. Refresh your admin panel
Front-end is not enough to only work on you, it’s just like keeping your face clean when putting on clumsy clothes – that’s not a good sign. The back-end or admin area of ​​a WordPress website is as important as its front view. There is a lot of hidden internal functioning that can be adapted.
- Remove themes that are no longer in use. A default WordPress site comes with lots of themes, but not all of them are required. In practice, you are not going to change your theme again and again. Therefore, dump your old theme and move forward with less burden.
- Remove pending and unsolicited comments. This gives a negative effect from the SEO point of view. Use the empty spam button to clear these comments with just one click , and this is regularly for better results. You can try the Antispam Bee plugin which is specifically to preserve your legitimate comments while preventing spam.
- Empty the trash bin again and again. The posts and pages of your WordPress website that you put in the trash will take your place until they are permanently removed. WordPress has the option to permanently delete posts in your trash bin so use it.
- Work on broken links. Links that do not work give a very bad impression to visitors and search engines. The primary step is to find such links and then fix them. Use plugins like the W3C Link Checker to find broken links. Next, either update them manually or redirect 301 (you should also check our article on how to remove broken links as well as our guide to updating permalinks).
- Clean your database. The database is an essential part, or the heart of your WordPress website, as it stores most of the required data. Therefore there is a need to manage it. This clean up may also include temporarily removing used disk space, post revision, spam comments, and other items in the trash, and leftovers from plugins and themes. Free WP-Optimize plugin is a very useful plugin with the help of which you can optimize your database in this way.
- Deactivate elements with less need. This is an easy way to trim the useless elements present in any WordPress Visual. Click on the tab called Screen Options in the top right corner of your WordPress dashboard . From here you can enable or disable various features by simply checking or unchecking the corresponding box.
- The taxonomy also has to be cleaned. If you have unused taxonomy on your website, get rid of it. When there are tags and categories that you are not using, remove them manually. Because taxonomies exist for each post type (which may include blog posts, portfolios, staff, testimonials, etc. depending on which topic and plugins you have active) you will need to visit each to check for unused items .
- Unused media should be disappeared. In WordPress, there is a separate folder, which is uploaded , which contains all the media files uploaded to your website. In the long run, it can lead to a mass storage and thus needs to be trimmed. Plugins such as Image Cleanup can find and delete such media files. You can also use the Force Regenerate Thumbnail plugin which will remove all the cropped images on the site which can be omitted from old themes and re-cropped images defined for your current theme which can take up a lot of space. Can be cleared if you have switched between several topics in the past.
- Trim widgets that you do not use. This applies to your dashboard widgets as well as the widgets you see in front of your website. To enable and disable the Aviolab box for your dashboard widget (seen on the main page when you first log in to your WordPress installation) open the Screen Options tab at the top of the screen . Widgets on the front end of your WordPress site can be found in your sidebar and footer under Appearance> widgets . Just drag and drop to change or reorder them.
It is not necessary that your WordPress website will lack all the above points. But nevertheless, keep an eye out for the investigation of any defect, even small changes can produce reasonable results.
Conclusion
Your WordPress website can be cleaned up and changed in a few hours. Decluttering can give it a more interactive view, by removing all irrelevant elements and arranging the rest better. In simple words, you need to remove unnecessary fat from your website. Just grab what is required and dump the remainder.
