New web site owners often ask me how much space they’d need for their blogs or pages. Generally, audio visual material and some PDF’s can take up lots of space. The good news is, most web hosts these days give you generous web space so it’s really not something you need to sweat right out of the gate.

On the other hand, as your site and traffic grows, it can be quite easy to hit that limit. I’ve done that several times – the good news is, most of the time people hit that limit not because they need to fill all that space or outgrown it. Though that happens. Most of the time, it’s because of poor housekeeping. So if you find your web site getting bloated, here are some ways you can trim it back down.

Clear out unused themes. No matter what you use be it WordPress or some other system, theme files can be huge because there’s so much in them. Some themes are leaner than others but if you have copies and copies of old themes you no longer use, no point keeping them around.

Clear out unused plugins. Same thing with plugins. Most plugins are pretty lean especially WordPress ones but there are more complex plugins that are pretty large. I’ve also seen sites that have gone plugin crazy with over 30 plugins uploaded, only a handful are being used. And, some plugins either do the same thing or there is another plugin that allows you to consolidate several features into one. If you hire a web developer, periodically put in a task to check if there are any plugins that are either not needed anymore and can be purged.

Removing old backups. When you backup your site from your web host control panel, chances are the backup is stored in your web site’s account. This directly impacts your available web space. I know you may be a little worried about deleting a backup. What you can do is download the backup to your computer first.

Check your emails and unused email boxes. This is a big culprit that tends to sneak up on people. So often, people ask for help about uploads not working when a quick check shows they have exceeded the web space because an old email or the default inbox has not been cleared out in a long time. Yup, those little emails aren’t that little when you have hundreds and thousands of them – mostly spam.

Optimize your images, CSS, Javascripts. Web building 101. Optimize your images for faster loading. But did you know your CSS stylesheets and Javascripts can be optimized too? This could make it harder for the designer to tweak or work on the files because compressed files are not human friendly. But on the same token, it can also help you speed up your site which is a good thing.

Push downloadable content to Amazon S3. By putting the largest files like audio, video and even PDF’s on Amazon you save a ton of space on your site, not to mention a lot of bandwidth too. You may be thinking that’s additional expense on top of your web hosting fees. Yes but you’ll be surprised to see how little it is. For example, all media on BloggingStarterPack, TechBasedTraining and even some on this site are fully hosted on Amazon. I’ve got lots of videos there – one of the products contains over 50 videos – we pay less than $1 a month.

Now you know bookmark this post. Next time you find your web site space getting up there, pull it out and run through the list to help you see where you can trim some of the excess and keep things neat and manageable.