I audit WordPress sites every week, and the same dead weight shows up almost every time. These 12 things slow your site down, confuse visitors, and hurt your search rankings. Removing them takes an afternoon and the results show up immediately.
The Cleanup List
1. Image sliders. Less than 1% of visitors click past the first slide. Sliders add 200-500KB of JavaScript and block rendering. Replace them with a single strong headline and a call to action.
2. Deactivated plugins. Every plugin sitting in your dashboard is a security risk, even when turned off. If you haven’t used it in 30 days, delete it entirely.
3. “Click here” links. Screen readers can’t parse them. Google can’t extract context from them. Write descriptive anchor text that tells people exactly where the link goes.
4. Auto-playing media. 66% of users mute auto-playing video immediately (Wistia, 2023). It burns mobile data and tanks your Core Web Vitals scores.
5. Orphan pages. Pages with zero internal links pointing to them are invisible to search engines. Either link to them or delete them. I wrote about this exact problem in my guide to website dead ends.
6. Social media icons in the header. You’re sending visitors away from your site before they read a single word. Move social links to the footer.
7. The tag cloud widget. It creates dozens of thin archive pages that dilute your SEO. Remove the widget and consider deleting unused tags from Posts > Tags.
8. Stock “About Us” text. “Welcome to our website” tells visitors nothing. Replace placeholder copy with real information about your business within the first sentence.
9. Broken contact forms. 28% of small business contact forms fail silently (Formstack, 2023). Send yourself a test submission right now. If it doesn’t arrive, fix it today.
10. Old WordPress themes. Keep your active theme and one default theme as a fallback. Delete every other theme. Each one is an unpatched attack surface.
11. Comment spam. Thousands of pending spam comments bloat your database. Bulk-delete them, then install a lightweight anti-spam solution. Your database queries will speed up.
12. Revision bloat. WordPress saves every draft revision by default. On a site with 200 posts, that can mean 2,000+ revision rows in your database. Add a revision limit or use WP-Optimize to clear old ones.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should I clean up my WordPress site?
I run this checklist quarterly. Plugin and theme cleanup should happen monthly as part of routine website maintenance.
Will removing plugins break my site?
Deactivated plugins are safe to delete. Active plugins need testing first. Take a full backup, remove one plugin at a time on a staging site, and check for errors before going live.
Does removing old post revisions improve speed?
Yes. On database-heavy sites, clearing revisions can cut query times by 20-40%. The difference is most noticeable on shared hosting where database resources are limited.
What to Do Next
Pick five items from this list and handle them this week. If your site needs a deeper cleanup or you’re not sure what’s safe to remove, get in touch and I’ll run a full audit.