How to Free Up Disk Space on Your WordPress Site
If your website runs out of WordPress storage space, you will face many problems.
Being over capacity or running low on storage space means you will have difficulty adding content, your hosting provider will be nagging you to upgrade to a more expensive plan, and your site might feel slower or even become unavailable.
How Much Storage Space Do I Need for WordPress?
You might be wondering “how much webspace do I need for a WordPress site?”.
The good news is, if you’re a blogger, coach, speaker, or digital product creator running a solo site, you probably don’t need as much storage as hosting companies try to sell you.
Most solo or small company sites with blog posts, images, and a few videos or PDFs will use less WordPress space than 5GB.
That includes:
- WordPress core files
- Your theme and plugins
- Blog images (properly compressed)
- A few downloadable resources or course materials
You’ll want more if you host a podcast, lots of HD videos, or high-res photography. But in most cases, those are better hosted off-site, like YouTube, Vimeo, or a podcast platform, and simply embedded on your site. That keeps things light and fast.
My advice is to start with 5 to 10GB of WordPress storage space. If your hosting plan offers more, great. Just don’t overpay because a host throws around big numbers. Clean, optimised sites rarely need more unless they’ve been left to grow unchecked for years.
If your current site feels bloated or slow, especially in the admin area of your WordPress, check storage is ok. A routine storage audit and cleanup will work wonders.
How to Check Storage Space in WordPress
If you want to know how to check your storage space usage in WordPress and know the exact size of your website, go to Tools > Site Health > Info > Directory and Sizes in your WordPress dashboard. This will show you the total size of your website. If you see it’s too large, you might need to clean it up.
Backup Then Optimize
Remember to take a full backup of your site before doing anything with these bloated files!
A big but often overlooked option is to use a migration plugin, which allows you to take a full backup, set up the site locally, do the optimizations, and then redeploy.
Sorry if that was obvious, but it has to be said!
Now, here are some of the best ways to diagnose your hosting, free up your space, and optimize your WordPress installation.
1. Clean Up Your Database
WordPress plugins generate junk data that can take up a lot of space and slow your website down to a crawl. Check out the previous article about cleaning up your WordPress database before continuing.
2. Don’t Use Your Hosting for Email
As mentioned in the previous part, a lot of people use the free email inboxes that come bundled with their web hosting.
This seems like a wise idea initially, it is convenient and saves money every month.
That is unless you keep storing your email there.
You see if you don’t download and delete your emails to your main computer, for example, because you have multiple devices using this inbox as your primary, then all of those emails and their attachments start to add up. A lot.
Rather than store your email on a POP3/IMAP account, have the hosting company or domain service forward the email to your primary email address or point the email domain and host your email elsewhere.
If you are like me, and heavily invested in the Apple and Google ecosystems (rightly or wrongly), you probably already have services handy. Otherwise, I recommend Fastmail.com (previously Fastmail.fm) as I used them happily for years back in the early 2000s and they are still going strong.
3. Offload Downloads
Offering your email subscribers and blog readers downloads such as ebooks and worksheets is a great idea, but the space used by these bonuses can increase a lot over time.
It is even more severe when you go from a brochure-style site or a blog to an online course, digital product sales, or membership site.
You have a couple of quick fixes available, however:
- First, you can compress your files, either into zip archives or by reducing the size of the individual files. For example, your PDF might have been generated for high-resolution printing, rather than reading on a computer or mobile device. Do your spoken voice podcast episodes need to be lossless audio?
- The second option and the one most large sites ultimately go for, is to offload as many files as makes sense. This does not have to be expensive either, for example, your digital downloads might be quite happily made available via your Dropbox or Google Drive that you already have, or even Github which is free and has the advantage of offering release versioning.
Given a super popular download, with thousands of daily users, you might need to look to Amazon S3 or a less expensive but compatible service. It depends on how popular your downloads are (Dropbox and Google Drive services are for syncing, not really for offering mass downloads to the public).
Obvious choices for offloading are large video and audio files where there are dedicated services that will not only take the storage requirements off of your main host but also improve the end-user experience.
Of course, for videos, you can also upload to YouTube. Yeah, you might lose your reader to the YouTube rabbit hole, but embedding videos can help your traffic in other ways (Google likes video, especially their own YouTube) so it could balance out.
4. Crop and Compress Your Images
Photographs can take up a huge amount of space, especially if they are straight out of your camera or your newer phone.
This is because the default output is intended to look as good as possible, rather than reduce the file size.
On the other hand, if you are viewing on a small device over a slow connection, you probably won’t appreciate seeing every hair and pore on your spokesmodel.
You can reduce the size of your images in three ways:
- Resizing and Cropping – Even “full screen” (for a given screen) images seldom need to be greater than 1920 pixels wide, and on the rare occasion they do need to be larger, they can be dealt with as an exception not the rule.
- Image Compression and Picture File Format – After image dimensions, the next way to reduce image file sizes is via how they are encoded. Not all image formats are made equal. Wherever possible you should use the smallest file that offers the most acceptible quality.
- Reduce Unnecessary or Unused Images – Getting rid of duplicated images, unused sizes, backup images/versions, or outdated pictures can clear up a massive amount of disk space.
Image compression plugins are highly popular in WordPress due to their impact on improving site and page loading speed.
There are lots of options, and they all work similarly. I like Shortpixel and I have an unlimited license that allows me to use the API in my DIY tools, but they have free options too both as a web service and in plugin form.
That said, even if you compress, resize, and crop before uploading, have you considered compressing all of your existing images? Even if it means running over the already compressed images again?
Yes, it sounds dumb, but it actually can work. Algorithms are often improved in more recent software, so even if you only save a few kilobytes per image, over lots and lots of images it can cumulatively add up to hundreds of megabytes.
That is also just sticking with existing formats, but despite good advice from even just a few years ago, the JPEG and PNG formats aren’t the most efficient options today. Newer formats such as WebP and AVIF can make images up to 20-30% even smaller.
After compression, clearing out alternative or duplicate images is another big space saver. WordPress will during upload create multiple image sizes but most of us seldom use all but a few of these, especially those of us who have already sized and cropped our images before uploading.
For blogs this can be a problem, for e-commerce sites with a lot of products in the catalog, it can be a huge issue.
There are a few plugins out there that can check for unused images and delete them. The safest option is to employ their “backup-then-delete” feature, but of course, if you are already close to or already out of space, that might not be an option (see how having a local version helps?).
Remember that none of these plugins can be 100% accurate, though most newer versions should be close. This is because you might have custom CSS, code snippets, embeds, and such that bypass the media library or pull directly from the file system.
5. Check for Large Files and Suspicious Folders
Sometimes, backups, old migrations, random .zip files, or even malware can take up a lot of space.
If you use SiteGround or another hosting provider with an online file manager, you can search for large files right from your control panel.
Look for unnecessary backups stored on the server instead of external storage like Google Drive, and keep an eye out for suspicious files that might have been put there without your knowledge (such as malware).
Regularly update your plugins and WordPress versions, and keep the file permissions locked down, to help prevent these issues.
More Space-Saving Tips:
If you are still running low on free space, here are some quick tips for other things you can do:
- Delete Unused Themes – In general you only need two themes installed, your currently active theme (plus your child theme) and a backup theme in case of problems. Do not keep any unused themes around, not just because they take up space (especially if they come with bundled demo content), but because it is yet another weak point that bad actors could exploit.
- Reduce Plugin Count – Plugins can also take up a lot of space and slow your site down. While some plugins are essential, many plugins can be used temporarily and then deleted, or their purpose performed outside of WordPress entirely. For example, you can batch-compress images and then from that point onwards use external tools before uploading them.
- Upgrade Your Storage Economically – Before admitting defeat and upgrading your hosting plan, some hosting services let you upgrade only the storage for just a dollar or two per month. Ask your hosting provider if they have options.
- Migrate – You do not have to stick with your current hosting provider if you can get a better deal elsewhere. It doesn’t hurt to look around, and many hosts even offer free migration to make attracting new customers easier. Even if that isn’t the case, it is no longer as difficult to move as it once was.
Bottom Line
WordPress does not need a lot of space to begin with. Many web hosts offer just 5 GB to new users on their starter plans!
Over time, however, we accrue more and more clutter and can fall into the habit of not cleaning the house like we are digital hoarders.
Not only can this cost us in terms of hosting costs, but it can slow down the site or even cause it to fail, so make sure you stay on top of it!
