Running out of storage space can prevent you from uploading new images, videos, and files. This guide will show you practical ways to reduce your storage usage to keep your site running smoothly.
To free up storage space, you can delete unwanted images, videos, and other media files. To remove files from your site that you no longer wish to display on the site, take the following steps.
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Media in the sidebar.
- In “List View” hover over a file name.
- Click the “Delete Permanently” link.
To bulk delete files:
- In “List View” click the checkbox next to the files you want to delete.
- Select “Delete Permanently” from the Bulk Actions drop-down menu.
- Click the “Apply” button.
- Click “OK” in the confirmation window to permanently delete the media files.
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Deleted files cannot be recovered. Deleted images, videos, and other media files will no longer appear on your website, including on all posts, pages, and widgets. Review these considerations before deleting media.
Large image files quickly eat into your storage quota. Photos taken by modern cameras (including smartphone cameras) are often much larger than is needed to display in high quality on a website.
To save on storage space, compress images before uploading them to reduce their file size and replace existing oversized images with optimized versions.
Visit our guide to learn how to optimize the images on your website.
Videos are often the files with the largest file size on a website. On the WordPress.com Premium plan, your videos count against your storage allotment of 13 GB.
On Business or Commerce plans with plugins installed, videos added through VideoPress do not count against your storage allotment, therefore you can upload videos to VideoPress to save on space.
Video and audio files consume significant storage space. Consider hosting large files with a third-party service and embedding them on your site.
- You can host videos on a free video service like YouTube, Vimeo, and many other services, then embed the video player on your website.
- You can host photos on an external hosting service such as Flickr and embed them on your site.
- You can host audio files on services like Soundcloud and Spotify and embed the audio player on your site.
Other common methods for reducing site storage are automatically handled for you on WordPress.com. You may encounter the following suggestions to reduce storage on your site, so we’ve included an explanation as to how that applies to your website on WordPress.com:
- Remove old themes: Themes installed from the WordPress.com theme collection do not count against site storage. On paid plans, you can upload third-party themes, and delete any themes you no longer need.
- Optimize database tables: Database maintenance is handled automatically by the platform.
- Implement caching: Cache management is built into every WordPress.com site and runs automatically.
- Remove old backups: Your website on WordPress.com is backed up automatically and backups are stored remotely, not affecting your site’s storage space. If you use a third-party backup plugin, those backups would be stored on your site and consume storage, therefore we do not recommend using a backup plugin in addition to your site’s included Jetpack VaultPress Backup service.
- Debugging logs: Enabling WP_DEBUG in wp-config.php and having a debug.log file consumes your site’s storage. Enabling debugging isn’t needed, because you can access all logs under Site Monitoring which doesn’t count against your site’s storage.
If you’ve already optimized your content and still need more space, upgrading your plan may be the best option. Higher-tier WordPress.com plans offer significantly more storage.
