Maintain data efficiency within your hosting

As your website has been around and worked on for a while, a lot of things a lot of things that can be set up more efficiently. In this blog post we will discuss the measures you can take to keep your website and hosting lean and mean. This for the best performance of your website, and avoiding avoiding unnecessary pollution.

Files within your hosting space

There are a lot of files that make up a website, many Content Management Systems such as Joomla or WordPress use over 3000 files just for the core operation. Once you've been running and setting up your website for a few months, you'll soon be well beyond this. Things like downloaded themes, plug-ins, and images pile up quickly and take up a lot of space. Especially with images this often accumulates quickly, because for every image you upload, multiple copies are often made and saved for deployment in different formats.

In order to keep order here, it is important to remove and clean up some things you don't use, including for example the database. You often have a lot of themes within WordPress that you have only tried in the development phase but otherwise not used. It is important to clean these up after the development phase, so that you do not have themes in your hosting that are just gathering dust. Because this is not the only thing they collect, it can also be used by malicious people to take over the website, and that even without having them activated.

The same goes for plug-ins within a website created with a Content Management System, as soon as you no longer use or need a plug-in it is important to clean it up as well. We generally recommend keeping your plug-in list below 8 plug-ins. More plug-ins means more resources that need to be loaded and also need to work together. This can quickly slow down your website, which is the last thing you want.

Database of your website

The database of a website can in most cases also become quite cluttered over the years, think of drafts of content that are stored with the default setting of WordPress without limit. And user comments or posts on your website. It is useful to change this setting directly within your wp-config.php file in the first months of your website. And limit the drafts to 3. This will ensure that you don't have 10 drafts of the same message stored. Which is totally unnecessary in almost all situations. Simply add the following line of code to your wp-config.php file:

You can modify this to what you would like to see reflected here, so in the example 2 revisions or drafts are saved this you can modify to your liking.

Furthermore, once a plug-in that you no longer use and have deactivated, it is important to check within the database as well. Always make a backup of the database before changing anything in it. But you can then delete or drop the database tables created by the plug-in that has since been removed. This way your database will not remain cluttered with data that is no longer relevant. So always pay attention to this before deleting anything. The wrong deletion can result in a website that no longer functions. Always make a backup before every action.

Comments or User Generated Content within your website

Another thing that can quickly cause contamination within a website and its database is User Generated Content, which often comes in the form of messages or comments left by visitors. We recommend moderating any form of User Generated Content manually and automatically. In fact, this is the most common method of spamming by malicious people. If you have had a website yourself for any period of time, you will be familiar with this.

Moderate any input from visitors, and clean it up regularly.

With these tips you will keep your website hosting as clean as possible, and your website will deliver the best performance. As also keeps the overall size of your website as small as possible, which can help you tremendously in several situations. Also, familiarize yourself with the directory structure and files of your website, so that you have an idea of what is going on under the hood, and where to look for what once there is a problem. This way, you will be best prepared to restore your website even in emergency situations.

Do you also want the best foundation for your website? Then choose hosting from MijnHostingPartner.nl!