A common question that we get asked  is, “I’m running out of disk space, do I need to upgrade to another hosting plan?”. As a business we would for you to upgrade to another level of hosting, but as your partner that would be the last step that we would take with you. We have compiled a checklist for areas to check before you shell out hard earned  money for more hosting. You will be surprised as to how much disk space you can clean up on website.

1) Clean up badcode and unused images and files.

Ok, so maybe cleaning the bad  and unused code is not something you can do on your own, so you may need to hire a developer to do this. Since code is not large in file size it really is not going to free up much disk space, but bad/unused code can cause your site to slow down so it may be worth your while to have a developer look into it. However, unused images is another story. Many times websites have old unused photos that are just sitting and not being used, consider finding these pictures and removing them.

2) Don’t store emails  on server

One of the first things that I look for when trying to clean up disk space on a web-server is emails. This is only relevant if you are using the email from the website control panel. I looked at one clients website to clean out and noticed that over 90% of the disk space was from old emails sitting in the trash bin. Do not forget to clean out the trash bin every now and then

3) Optimizing images and mp3 files

Ever been to the website when you can actually see the graphic load from the top to the bottom? What the usually means is that the webmaster uploaded a very large picture file and just lowered the dimensions to fit into the webpage without changing the image size. Most of the time this is from someone taking a photo from a digital camera and uploading it to the website without optimizing the photo for web use. You should try to keep the picture file size to below 50 kb. This will free up web-space, and also enhance the users experience on your website.

Do you also have more ways that you use to optimize your website? Post the comment below.