Rookie question about code clean up

[Simon Seirup]

Hello there!

Im a complete rookie as a webmaster, currently establishing my very first webshop in WooCommerce. In the beginning I bought a theme that have now been changed completely, and now I would like to look at the code to get a better understanding of how things work, and also speed up my site a little.

My site is hosted at UnoEuro, so I have been fooling around in the 'File Manager', and found out that all images I have been deleting from the site, is still to be found in this file manager. I assume I can just delete those? Also I have been finding other seemenly useless files that I was thinking of deleting, forexample irrelevant language files like 'admin-fr_FR.mo', 'admin-network-es_ES.po', 'twentyfourteen-fr_FR.mo' and city files like 'continents-cities-nl_NL.mo' can i just delete all files with irrelavant country? :-)

Any tips for this would be great!

Thanks in advance!

Greetings, Simon

[lucy24]

It's your own site, so you can delete anything you like. Sure, delete images you're not using any more. There is probably a Preference setting that controls what to do with deleted files: "really" delete them, or just throw them into another directory.

But suppose that further along you transfer your site administration to someone whose preferred language is, say, nb instead of nn? They'll click a preference button somewhere, the software will look for the appropriate admin files-- and then what happens?

If a site has a lot of unused files, it could fractionally slow down server time, as the server has to spend extra nanoseconds looking through a 5000-file directory for the 5 files it actually needs. But in your administrator directory this is not important, since nobody but you will ever be in there anyway. (Later on, we can talk about ways to keep nasty robots out, because they will ask for files they have no right to see.)

Always keep a backup. But backups should live in some entirely different location, not on the same server as the live site. If you're small, just keep a copy of the whole site on your personal hard drive. Then if disaster strikes you can easily re-upload. In particular, always keep a local copy of your htaccess file so you can fix things when you get hacked.

[lorax]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Simon_Seirup!

You may want to read the Theme Development section of the WordPress Documentation. It has a lot of good information on how things work. [codex.wordpress.org...]

[tangor]

As a rookie your first necessary step is to secure your site! You have much study and learning ahead. As for those pics, leave 'em alone. Unless you have a small storage space on your host server, they will have no impact on your site.

Language files? Ignore them. If not called, will not be used, thus no overhead on server.

Set your prefs, secure your site. These things you do FIRST.

And welcome to the forum!

[Mroffline]

I'd start by downloading the site (as a backup). Unoeuro takes around $40 to restore.
Then delete/edit what you want. You can always upload if anything goes wrong.