Over time, you are bound to accumulate a lot of bloat on your blog. As of April 2011, i had managed to accumulate about 500MB of this on the blog “Diary of a Geek”. This can be caused by any combination of the following, the list is however not exhaustive;
- Continual installation and deleting of plugins from your blog. Most plugins are not fully uninstalled when you delete them, they leave parts of them behind.
- Large image files. They all add up at the end of the day.
- Databases of plugins, especially the ones that collect blog statistics
I knew i had to shed some weight and that i did by cleaning out the whole website and started afresh. To prevent a reoccurrence of the bloat, i took the following steps;
- Blog statistics were finally “outsourced” to Google Analytics. They are less generous with their figures, but i guess they are the real deal. That way, the database will not be housed on my site.
- Limiting images uploaded to the site to not more than 30kb, except in a few instances.
- Testing plugins on a test site before adopting it on the blog site, that way i will know if that is what i need. This will prevent unnecessary uninstallations.
- Manually coding your themes to achieve desired results with less reliance on plugins.
Now i feel light and free, down from 500MB to just a little over 50MB!
Below are the traffic stats for the blog for the month of May, 2011;
Google Analytics
Visits : 2,419
Absolute Unique Visitors : 2,026
Page Views : 3,369
Website Grader
Website Grade : 96
Blog Grade : 47
Moz Rank
Moz Rank : 3
Alexa Ranking
Worldwide : 83,799
Nigeria : 435
