Hi, I’ve been running a WordPress site for quite a while… Maybe 2 years. I experimented with countless plugins for blogging, multilanguage setup, selling courses, letting clients book coaching calls, etc…. I now finally found a stack that I feel gives me everything I want from my site.
I’m currently re-writing my entire blog (I have 200+ posts that I never uploaded + all posts are being heavily SEO optimized). I already doubled my traffic and frankly, I expect I’ll easily 10x my traffic given the massive amount of work I’m doing. Probably much more tbh since every post also will come out in 4 languages…
So now the question is whether I should start with a fresh install.
E. g. my new setup uses SureCart instead of WooCommerce. My old setup also uses ThriveApprentice, and I intend to switch to Tutor LMS. So my old site has tons of DB entries that are no longer needed or won’t be very soon. These two plugins are only the tip of the iceberg (login plugins, etc, lots of abandoned projects/approaches that I didn’t use for months or 1+ years)
Would that speed up my WordPress Site? Or it doesn’t really matter since the tables are simply not used? I also have 100s of old, unused images. With most of them, I can’t even tell if they are safe to delete. A fresh install would solve that problem since I just set up what I need.
Is the worst thing happening that the inodes limit on my site is more easily used up with my hosting if I keep all the legacy DB entries?
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Hard to say. If I had to guess, I’d say that it probably won’t make much difference, because as you rightly said, any tables that were left behind from old plugins are simply ignored. However a lot of plugins do that junk to the WP core tables, esp wp_options.
That said, if it were me, I’d do a clean install just for peace of mind, so I know for sure there isn’t anything unwanted in the DB i.e. fresh copy of WP, bring over the plugins and theme, import the content. That will give you a clean install, with only the stuff you’re using at present existing in the DB.
In terms of speeding up the site – optimize images, get better hosting, implement caching – the usual.