WordPress Cleanup after Install

Video Transcript

Whenever you first install WordPress and start poking around, checking out your new website, you’re going to see that it came installed with what I call placeholders – things like a sample post and a sample comment associated with that sample post, a sample page, and so on. And these items should be cleaned out, kind of like those pictures that come in the picture frame that you buy – that kind of show you what the picture frame would look like with the picture in it. And hopefully, the first thing you do whenever you get home with that new picture frame is you replace that placeholder picture with your own picture. Well, the same goes with the placeholder items in our WordPress site, and that’s what we’re going to be covering in this video.

So let’s go ahead and get started and log into our Admin area, which I’ve already done here. And just to kind of recap that, you get to your Admin area, or in this case, Dashboard, by putting wp-admin at the end of your domain name up here in the address bar of your browser. And if you’ve logged in recently, then you’ll come automatically to this page. If not, you’ll be presented with that login screen where you have to enter your username and your password, hit Enter, and then you’ll be brought to this page.
So let’s go ahead and check out that sample post. Go ahead and click on post. And in this example, where going to just trash the sample post. And along with that deleting of the sample post, our comment associated with that sample post will also automatically be deleted.

If you wanted to delete the comment individually, you just come on down here to the comments. You need to select that. Under Bulk Actions, click on Move to Trash. Or if you hover over the actual comment, you have these options here where you can reply, quick edit, edit, spam, or trash it here. So in either case, either individually by going to the comments or kind of a combo deal, and I’m all for saving time. We’ll just do that deletion of the comment along with the deletion of our sample post. Just click on Trash, and it’s moved up here to the Trash bin. Head on down to our sample page and do the same thing there. Click on Trash, and it’s gone as well. And by the way, if you check out the Comments section here, you can see there’s no comments in there because again, it was deleted along with our sample post.

Let’s come on down to Appearance. That’s where our default themes are installed. And since we’re only going to be able to have one theme at a time being shown to our visitors, there’s no reason to have all these themes in here. I know some people will have 15 or 20 different themes installed on their site, which is okay, I guess. It’s just you’re asking your site to do a whole lot of extra work that it doesn’t have to. And each one of those themes will need to be updated each time there’s a change. And since WordPress makes it so easy to install and activate a new theme, why not go ahead and just have the one theme that you’re using at the time installed on your site. And when you decide it’s time for a change, then go in and install that new theme and activate it. That way you only have one theme in your site. That one theme is the only theme that has to be updated when the time comes. You don’t have to worry about bugs associated with any other themes in your site because you only have the one.

That said, let’s go ahead and delete the themes we’re not going to be using. And you’ll see here, as you hover over these icons here for these themes, you don’t have a Delete button here. You get to the Delete button by just clicking on the icon that brings you to this page here. And down to the lower-right corner is the Delete button. Then click on Ok to delete it, and it’s gone. Do the same thing with the other theme. Just click on for theme details. Lower-right corner, click on Delete. Pop-up button, click on Ok. And now we’ve cleaned out all of our unused themes. We only have the one in there right now, good deal.
Do the same thing with plugins. Click on the Plugins link over here in the sidebar. And the Limit login attempts plugin was automatically installed and activated during our installation process. But if you only installed using the manual method that we covered in an earlier video, then you won’t see this plugin on here. You only see these two plugins. These two plugins come automatically installed – not activated, but automatically installed – on any installation of WordPress, be it the one-click installation or the manual installation. The Akismet plugin is to help minimize or eliminate comment spam or trackback spam. So I’m going to go ahead and delete both Akismet and Hello Dolly. Hello Dolly is basically just a plugin that I’ve never really used, never really looked at. And actually, I just keep deleting it. So I’m going to select these and delete them. Under Bulk Actions, click on Delete, then click on Apply. And then click on Yes, delete these files.

Now if you want to use Akismet or keep Hello Dolly, you’re more than welcome to. No harm in keeping those. But you really should only have activated plugins that you’re using in the plugin area. If you’re not using the plugin, get rid of it.
And that’s pretty much it for the Admin area of our WordPress site. The last things that I want to clean out of our WordPress installation requires to access the files, either through our File Manager within cPanel or your FTP client. I’m going to be showing you this through the File Manager of our cPanel control panel. I’ve already logged into my control panel here. Come on down here and click on File Manager. And again, you can do the same thing by using your FTP client. But log into the root directory of your WordPress installation. And you’re going to see a file that says License.txt. Go and select that. You’re going to also see another file titled Readme.html. I’m going to hold the Ctrl key down on my keyboard and select that one. That way it selects multiple files at the same time. And you may also see a wp-config-sample.php file, not the config.php but the one that says config-sample. Select that one also by holding down the Ctrl key on my keyboard and selecting that one. These three files are dead weight. There’s no reason to have them, so I’m going to delete them. Kind of the same idea behind the extra plugins and the extra themes – dead weight, you’re not using them, get rid of them.

One last item under the wp-admin directory or folder. Open that up and scroll down a bit until you come to the install-helper and the install.php files. Neither one of these are needed anymore because hey, it’s already installed. So select both of those. Come on up here and delete them. And we’re done with file manager. And actually, we’re done with our cleanup process.
That’s going to bring us to the end of this video on cleaning up the placeholder items that come with the new WordPress install. Thanks for watching and you have a great day.