Happy Spring! Spring is such a great time of year with flowers blooming, birds singing and yes, spring cleaning. Okay, so maybe the spring cleaning isn’t so much fun but it does need to be done. This article tackles spring cleaning and your SocialEngine website.
We know what spring cleaning is for our home or office, but what about our website? What can or should we do to spring clean our website? Good question! Here are some tips:
SocialEngine Self-Hosted
Clean Your Server Files
Over the years, or maybe even just months, you can accumulate a lot of unnecessary files on the server. This can bog down your server and consume resources. We suggest that you take a backup of all of your files and your database before proceeding. The following files should be removed:
- Zip and/or tar uploads of software or plugins – you should never store these on your server.
- Old backups – find a good storage space for these and remove them from your server. If you have a large site, you should have off-site backups. Never store backups on your main server. If your site gets hacked, you’ve given the hackers an easy zip download of your entire site.
- Old plugins – be careful with this. If you are not experienced at removing plugins, please contact the third party expert that you bought the plugin from. If that expert is no longer around, please seek help from another third party expert to remove these. You would want to clean up the database entries as well.
- Old themes – remove old themes using the above tutorial or by having a third party expert remove them. Some themes did edit the database and you’ll need to know if your theme did, before removal.
Clean and Optimize Your Database
Before doing this, please backup your database. If you are not an advanced database user, please get a third party expert or your host to help you with this.
- Remove unused plugins and database entries/tables.
- Click to optimize the database in PHPmyadmin.
SocialEngine Cloud
For SocialEngine Cloud, you’ll want to remove things you may not be using and may have enabled:
- Themes – remove any themes you may have installed or created and are not using. You cannot remove the default themes but if you had third party themes or created some themes, you can click “Delete” to remove those.
- RSS Feeds – delete any that are no longer relevant to your site.
Both SocialEngine Self-Hosted and SocialEngine Cloud
Some features are available in both SocialEngine Self-Hosted and SocialEngine Cloud. Here are some that you can clean up on either platform:
- Media Manager – remove any old photos or files that you no longer need.
- Members – remove spammers and their content. This is important as it can impact your search engine rankings.
- Update Social Media – a good idea is to check your social media accounts and update those with current colors (where available), banners, icons and profile images. Perhaps update contact info and site links for those as well.
We hope these tips help you with your website spring cleaning! Please feel free to join our SocialEngine community and post any questions you have about this article or to request more!
“The most effective way to do it, is to do it. ~ Amelia Earhart
