Hi Support!
My new hosting company mentioned how large my database is, possible reasons as to why it’s so large and recommendations on how to fix this. Below is the info they shared with me – along with my questions to see if Smush Pro settings may need to be adjusted to rectify the issues. I’ve enabled ‘support’ in my WordPress dashboard, so feel free to take a look at my settings. Please let me know if you need any additional info! Thank you.
Info from hosting:
I should also point out that currently your account exceeds the disk space normally available under your plan by around 4GB. This isn’t so much a problem – currently I have increased the allowance, however this seems to be rather a needless problem to have. The reason for this seems to be that you have a very high number of duplicate files – for example, you’ll have something like:
Two-Way-Tahini-DAte-Shake.bak.jpg
Two-Way-Tahini-DAte-Shake.jpg
It appears that at some point someone (a developer) has made some changes to your images which has resulted in this duplication. It can also be that you also upload very large images and are not using any kind of image optimization plugin. It’s possible to delete the “.bak.jpg” duplicate files, but since it’s not really possible to say if the “.bak.jpg” images are in use anywhere, I would strongly recommend using an image optimization plugin like ShortPixel or Imagify. Choose the lowest compression setting (i.e. the one which has no impact on quality) and also set it to resize large images, in the event you’ve uploaded any huge photos (like 3000px wide or something). Imagify definitely has this setting – not sure about ShortPixel. Be sure to set it to NOT backup the original files – it’s not necessary if you’re choosing the safe, low/no compression optimization. Once you have run that it should make a significant improvement because a media library of almost 19GB is extremely large – it’s one of the largest I’ve seen, and if you allow it to grow you may find it very difficult to manage over time!
Questions / Next Steps:
When doing a bulk smush, I turned on the ‘Keep original files’ option because I wasn’t sure if I had the original files for all of the images used on older posts. This setting is still ‘on’ but I’m happy to turn this ‘off’ – however, is it possible to download the file with the original images from the server so I know that I have them and then delete that folder from my website?
If so, could you tell me the file name I should look for on the server?
Are any of my Smush Pro settings causing this .bak duplicate file? If so, can you tell me how those .bak files are being used? And can we safely delete them from the website?
Any other info or setting changes to help rectify this issue would be greatly appreciated!
