Each student at St. Norbert is given one gigabyte of space on their domain for free through the Knight Domains program. This storage can fill up quickly, especially if you decide to use many large images on your website. I’ll show you the way to check how much storage you have used so far and two helpful plugins to reduce that number!
LOOKING AT STORAGE THROUGH CPANEL
You can check how much storage is being used up on your domain in a few short steps through the CPanel.
First, travel to https://knight.domains and click the “login” button in the middle of the left-hand side. The site will prompt you to login with your SNC Google account. Once logged in, travel to the “CPanel” Tab on the top right-hand side
Next, while in the CPanel, on the right sidebar, under the statistics section,you’ll see your overall storage under disk usage.. To view a more in-depth description of your storage, click “Disk Usage.”
The Disk Storage screen will show you a breakdown of what items on your domain are taking up the most space.
For example, my website on cassienooyen.com is taking up 209MB, techbar.crnooyen.knight.domains is taking up 310MB, and lastly, public_html is taking up 286 MB. (public_html is the main website hosted on your domain. For me, it’s crnooyen.knight.domains.)
REDUCING THE SIZE OF UPLOADED IMAGES (IMSANITY)
Imsanity is a plugin that will reduce the resolution of images uploaded to your media library, thus reducing their file size.
To download Imsanity, select the “Plugin” option from the menu on the left-hand side about halfway down. On the top left, select “Add New” next to the word “Plugins.”
Use the search bar on the right-hand side to search “Imsanity”. Click “Install Now,” the first option on the left side. Once it is installed, click “Activate.”
Travel back to the Dashboard of your site. Then hover over the “Settings” option on the menu on the lower left-hand side, then click on “Imsanity” from the second menu that appears.
The screen below should appear with the default settings shown. I decided not to change any settings, but if you wanted to make the images smaller than suggested, you could change the max-width and height to less than 1920. If you decide to change any settings, remember to click “Save Changes” near the bottom of the screen.
Once the settings are to your liking, scroll all the way to the bottom of the screen and click “Search Images…”. This will search your media library to find images larger than the settings above.
Above the “Search Images” button, you may notice the disclaimer to try it with only one image at first. I decided to deselect all the images except the top image.
In a new tab, I navigated to my “Media Library” and found the picture the disclaimer was referencing. At the very beginning of the image name, WordPress gives you the month and year the image was uploaded. For example, the image below was listed as “Image 1394: 2020/02/IMG_3146-scaled.jpg” meaning it was uploaded in February of 2020.
After the image name, the current dimensions are given. These can be compared to the dimensions given in the media library in the top right section.
After checking the image, I went back to the “Plugin Settings” tab and clicked “Resize Selected Images”. I then went back into my “Media Library” and saw the selected image was now 1920×1440 [originally: 2560×1920]. This is how I knew it worked so I went back and resized the rest of my images.
After running the “Resize Selected Images” the “Media Library” showed that they all were correctly resized and the image sizes were decreased.
FINDING AND DELETING DUPLICATE AND UNUSED IMAGES (IMAGE CLEANUP)
Another plugin that can help reduce storage space is called “Image Cleanup.” This plugin removes all the images that are uploaded to the Media Library but are not in use on your website.
The first step is to travel to the “Plugin” page in order to download the plugin. “Plugin” can be found about halfway down the left-hand side menu. Once on the page, click the “Add New” button on the top.
In the top-right search bar, type in “Image Cleanup” and hit enter.
Once the search results load, you may have to scroll down a bit down the page. The plugin is on the right side of the screenshot below with the gray triangle picture. Click “Install Now” and then afterward “Activate”.
To use the plugin, hover over the “Tools” option on the left-hand menu and then select “Image Cleanup” from the smaller menu that appears.
Once on this screen, click “Index Images” on the top of the screen. Once the results load, the two groups of images that we are going to delete are the “Unreferenced Unused Images” and “Obsolete Referenced Images”.
For each of these two categories, click the checkbox next to “Index” on the top bar of the table. Then, right above, click the dropdown and select “Delete”. The default option on the dropdown may be set to “Quick Action.” To delete the images, select “Apply.”
Once this is done for both categories, all of the unused images are now deleted.
Alongside installing these two plugins, another thing to look for is the number of videos that are in your Media Library. If there are multiple long videos, instead consider uploading them to YouTube! When uploading a video, YouTube gives the option to make it “Unlisted” meaning only those who have the link can view it, and then that link can be used to embed the video on your site.