Do you have a personal blog site or portfolio site? You might and Nicely Done hosts several of them. These sites can be a great way to share your interests with family and friends (and the world) or prospective employers or clients. When it started out the amount of file space that was available seemed to be limitless but as the site has grown it is suddenly becoming more finite. When that space runs out nothing more will be able to be added, so before that happens what can you do?
What takes up the most space?
Typically two things take up the most space with a WordPress site: plugins and media. Your blog site is no different.
To make room with plugins they will need to be removed, disabling them will not create any space. If you have plugins that are not being used or are being underutilized it may be a good idea to uninstall them. Doing so can potentially free up quite a bit of space.
The other item that takes up a lot of space on a blog site (or any site for that matter) is media. With modern digital cameras and video these files can be potentially huge. A single photo today can be 10 megabytes in size and videos typically are much larger than that. Chances are your blog site or portfolio site is dotted with them, after all you love sharing your photos with others. Pictures may be worth a thousand words but they take up much more space than a thousand words.
How can I reduce the file sizes of my media?
Chances are your site has a lot of photos. Reducing the size of these photos can free up a lot of space, with the further benefit of making your site easier to load thereby enhancing your SEO. Resizing an image is the easiest way to reduce file size and finding the right balance is key. On many monitors a typical image will not look much different between its original size and a smaller size. What is the right size to change it to? 800×600 is typically the most common but you might need to experiment with that. It is possible to take a 3.5 MB image and reduce it to 60 KB.
Do not use the image editing component of WordPress.
Why? The original photo is still retained, therefore no space has been freed up and your blog site is right back where it started.
The file type is also important so which one do you change it to? Chances are your original file is a .jpg so why mess with a good thing? A .jpg file offers the best mix of compression and visual appeal so stick with that. The .jpg also has a large color palette to work with making it great for photographs or complex images and it can be saved in different levels of quality, all of which affect the file size.
Photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop works very well for this. It is also possible to do multiple images at the same time, making the process go much smoother. Just don’t forget to retain a copy of the original image! There is also an option to save the images for the web to adjust the quality of the image. There are other more affordable options as well (but with fewer features), as Photoshop is not a cheap piece of software.
But what about video?
Video operates much the same way. The quality of video has increased dramatically in the past half decade and with that comes an increased file size. MP4 type videos tend to work best since all browsers and platforms can support them. Video editing software can be used to optimize the video for the web without losing quality. Just like with photos, you want your website to load quickly not only to retain visitors but also to increase your SEO and optimizing your video makes that much better.
With a faster loading website you not only will make your visitors browsing experience much more pleasant but it will help dramatically with your SEO ranking while not giving up too much in quality. You could probably even keep a few of your favorite images at the regular size too. Not only that but now you can add more to your site at a later date so that you can keep sharing what you love with the world. Your file hosting service will feel much better about that.