Last week, I managed to jump on a call with Kelly McCausey of SoloSmarts who wanted to talk to me about detoxing a WordPress powered site. Kelly had some fabulous questions such as:

1. Why keep up with updates.
2. Are some plugins no longer necessary?
3. Is my theme hopelessly outdated?
4. How to deal with broken links?
5. How to deal with non-automated spam. This one is tough as most spam filters are good at detected automated spam, not human generated spam.

We had a great conversation some good info. Listen in here (nothing to pay).

P/S: To expand on plugins that are no longer necessary, here are some I used in the past but no longer because new WordPress features have rendered them unnecessary for our projects.

• Exclude Pages. We now use the built in WordPress menu feature.
• Page Links To. This plugin used to help create navigation menus that redirect to outside sites etc without having to edit code. Again we just use WordPress menu. However there are times this is still useful.
• Plugins to close comments on old posts. This feature is now built into WordPress.