Share Your WordPress Spring Cleaning Tips

[Jeffro]

Often we hear that a self hosted site built on WordPress is like having a house and at times, it needs to be taken care of like a house. For example, Spring cleaning. What are some of your Spring cleaning tips or suggestions? I'm going to round these up into a post :)

In no particular order with the exception of the first task, this is what I do.

Create a full backup of my website.

Check installed and deactivated plugins. Re-evaluate which ones I can live without. Not only do I disable these plugins, I delete them so I don't forget to do it later.

Evaluate which widgets I need and use most on the dashboard. As it turns out, the Right now box and my Ad publisher alert box are the only ones I use most often. Amazing how much faster the dashboard loads when it's not pulling in any outside feeds.

I then install one of the many Post Revision plugins to check how many I have stored in the database. I then delete them.

I log into my control panel, browse phpMyAdmin, go through each database while selecting all tables and use the optimize command.

Re-evaluate the widgets in use and decide whether I can do without some of them, especially as some of the plugins I deleted may have been dependent on a widget.

Make sure all plugins are up to date, core is up to date, and my spam queue is down to 0 which is normally is because I keep it clean.

Re-evaluate any third party services I'm using and decide if I really need to use them or not.

After I'm all done, I create another backup so I don't have to repeat all those steps. Perhaps it's just me, but the site always seems snappier when I complete the cleansing. It's the same feeling I get when I thoroughly clean the inside of my PC.

[Ryan]

I periodically scan for malicious code which may have made it's way into my site.

I also check that my backups are actually working. Last thing you want is to have a regular backup routine, only to find out when the time comes, that every backup you ever made was corrupt or missing crucial data anyway.

I periodically look through various older plugins I've written and check for errors, performance bottle-necks, security issues etc. Having a fresh look at old code tends to show up problems which weren't noticed when writing them.

[Elpie]

I do a drastic spring-clean about every 12-18 months. I export my blogs, install a new WP, import the old blog, then start testing and benchmarking. My essential custom functions are always in their own custom functions file, making them easy to call into any theme through an include in the theme's functions.php. This goes in first & performance checked. Then I install and test each plugin, looking at speed and performance. Once those are tested, my theme goes in. By this stage, I have a really clean database and have pinpointed where there are any performance issues or slow queries.

I used to do regular spring-cleans the way Jeffro does but found that by the time a blog has gone through several updates and plugins have been changed and/or updated there was just so much rubbish left behind in the database. Plugins are really bad at leaving things behind (on one site, I just found a cron job running that has been running for two years after the plugin had been deleted!)

It's a bit of extra work to do a major cleanup like this but its always resulted in performance gains so I keep doing it.

[chipbennett]

I do a drastic spring-clean about every 12-18 months. I export my blogs, install a new WP, import the old blog, then start testing and benchmarking. My essential custom functions are always in their own custom functions file, making them easy to call into any theme through an include in the theme's functions.php. This goes in first & performance checked. Then I install and test each plugin, looking at speed and performance. Once those are tested, my theme goes in. By this stage, I have a really clean database and have pinpointed where there are any performance issues or slow queries.

I used to do regular spring-cleans the way Jeffro does but found that by the time a blog has gone through several updates and plugins have been changed and/or updated there was just so much rubbish left behind in the database. Plugins are really bad at leaving things behind (on one site, I just found a cron job running that has been running for two years after the plugin had been deleted!)

It's a bit of extra work to do a major cleanup like this but its always resulted in performance gains so I keep doing it.

Yeah, I've come to the conclusion that the database cleanup is the most useful. The crud left behind by Themes (which have no real means to clean up after themselves) and Plugins (which really have no excuse NOT to clean up after themselves) becomes rather substantial.

[webbyrobster]

As a newbie I try and backup wordpress every week using http://myeasywp.com/plugins/myeasybackup/ and in terms of plugins, if I haven't used them in a 2 month period I remove them.

[chipbennett]

As a newbie I try and backup wordpress every week using http://myeasywp.com/plugins/myeasybackup/ and in terms of plugins, if I haven't used them in a 2 month period I remove them.

I do daily DB backups. I backup my /uploads/ less frequently, but only because I've not found a perfect backup solution for several gigs' worth of /uploads/ data. As it is, I my 3GB or so worth of photos chokes BackupBuddy and any other automated solution that I've tried thus far.

[Ryan]

I backup 6 GB of data via BackupBuddy daily. I didn't even realise there was a bottleneck somewhere. I hope I don't find it any time soon :(

[AutoBlogged]

I personally like to build a new site from scratch after a while and just import the content from the old site. That gives me a chance to update everything on a non-live site and do any updates and any improvements I need that would be too disruptive on the main site, plus it ensures I am working from a fresh code base in case any malware has creeped onto the old site.

Put whatever you do, it's also a good time to go in and change all your passwords related to the site as well (FTP, WP, MySQL, cPanel, DNS, registrar, etc).

[Jeffro]

I forgot to mention this one but running the Broken Link Checker plugin from time to time is probably a good thing.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/...-link-checker/