Without regular maintenance, your WordPress website can become vulnerable to security issues and may even slow down from the junk added to your site over time. This presentation will explore 10 areas to dig into your older WordPess installation and help you clean up the cobwebs accumulated from months of publishing posts as well as adding/removing plugins and themes.

1. Spring Cleaning for
Your WordPress Site
Social Web Dzine

2. • Single mom for 9 years
• Home-based freelancer
• Weyauwega, WI
• WordPress user for 8 years
• Find me at:
– SocialWebDzine.com
– @SocialWebDzine
– Facebook.com/SocialWebDzine
This is me…

3. Social Web Dzine...
Before Spring Cleaning
Pingdom
• score: 67/100
• load time: 8.75 seconds
• Slower than 85% of all tested
websites
PageSpeed
• Score 87/100
Security Check with Sucuri

4. Backup your site – I use BackupBuddy
Delete unused plugins/themes
Empty the spam queue
Start with the basics…
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5. Reduce spam by closing comments on old posts
Settings  Discussion  Check the box that says “automatically close comments on
articles older than X days and enter an appropriate time period for your blog
Remove unused files in the media library
Double check for any that are unattached and make sure they aren’t used in your
theme or a widget somewhere
Clean up unused drafts
Basics continued…
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5
6

6. Images Categories and Tags
• If you prepare images before
uploading you can disable image
resizing and reduce the size of
your backup file
– Settings  Media  0
• Delete categories/tags with no
posts
• Edit posts to add relevant
categories/tags
• Add descriptions to your
categories/tags – this is useful
for visitors & search engines
This will help you better organize
your site
Optional

7. Change the SALT key in your wp_config file
Make sure you’re not using “admin” as your username
Check the database prefix and change it if it’s using the default “wp_”
–Can use a plugin like Change Table Prefix
Advanced…
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8. Social Web Dzine...
After Spring Cleaning
Pingdom
• score: 67/100 - same
• load time: 1.98 seconds
– Was 8.75
• Faster than 70% of all tested
websites
– Was slower than 85% of all
tested websites
PageSpeed
• Score 94/100
– Was 87/100

9. Do you
have any
question ?
Closing