The content explains the importance of cleaning up unused images in your WordPress media library to save storage space on the server and improve image organization. It suggests two ways to clean up images: adjusting image sizes settings in WordPress settings and using the Media Cleaner Plugin. By following these steps, you can effectively manage your WordPress images and keep your media library organized. Remember to backup your website before deleting any files to avoid potential issues. Overall, the tips provided can help you optimize your website’s image storage and improve efficiency.
Have you reviewed your media library since you set up your WordPress site? You might be surprised to learn that in addition to important files, your media library also contains a lot of unused and irrelevant images.
Here I will explain why you should clean up your WordPress images. Let’s go through 2 ways to rearrange your images.
Why Should You Clean Up WordPress Images?
There are two common reasons to clean up your library:
Save storage space on the server
Whenever you upload an image to your library, WordPress automatically creates different versions of it. Common image sizes are small, medium, and large. Plugins and themes also require different image sizes. As a result, each of your images has at least 5 separate copies.
These never-used files will take up a lot of space on your hosting server. As a result, it will take longer to back up your website than usual. On top of that, increasing your storage can cost you more money each month even though you don’t use that much disk space.
Better image organization
The number of media files in your media library keeps growing over time. If you don’t clean it up, it will become full of unnecessary images. From there, you will find it difficult and time-consuming to find and reuse old files.
You can’t just scroll down an endless list of images to click on each one. Removing unused images helps keep your WordPress gallery clean.
2 Simple Ways to Clean Up WordPress Images
#1 Stop creating duplicate images with different sizes
As I mentioned above, WordPress automatically duplicates an uploaded file with different sizes. To stop this, all you need to do is visit the Vehicle in Setting in your WordPress admin dashboard.
#2 Clean up WordPress images with Media Cleaner Plugin
Media Cleaner helps move all files that are not embedded anywhere on the web to the internal trash. You can later decide to delete or ignore those files. Follow the instructions below to get started with the plugin:
- Go to Plugins → Add New in your admin dashboard
- Type “media clean” in the keyword box to search for the plugin
- Install and activate the plugin
- Open the new Cleaner section in your Media menu
- Hit the Scan button so the plugin can start looking through your library, pages and posts to check which files are currently unused
- Check the boxes of the files you want to permanently delete
- Click Delete all or Delete … items to delete these files
Remember that you must backup your website before doing any action otherwise it may corrupt your library. Once you delete files, you cannot undo and restore them in any way.
Epilogue
Hopefully these two small tips will help you arrange your website images more effectively. If you find it interesting, you can follow the basic WordPress section to learn more new knowledge.
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