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How Can I Increase the Storage on My Website?

← Media & Documents
Sometimes, when you're working on a site, you may need to upload a lot of pictures, files, and media. If you're seeing an error message that says that your storage space is full, you can resolve this issue by using the options we will provide below.

Remove Old Image and Documents


Removing old images and other files when you no longer need them on your site is always a good idea. Whenever you change or delete a page and find that there are images or documents used on that page that you will no longer need, go into your Media Folder and Document Manager list and delete them.

We also recommend going through your Media Folder and Document Manager list at least once or twice a year and clean them out, removing all the old, unused items that you may have missed. This typically frees up many MBs of storage space.

WP Smush Pro


This plugin compresses the size of your images without reducing the quality. We recommend using it for every single image used on your site. Below are the steps for compressing your files using WP Smush Pro.

*Due to this process using a lot of server resources, please only perform the procedure, after business hours, when less people are using the site.

In order to use WP Smush Pro to reduce image file sizes, improve site performance, and boost your SEO, activate WP Smush Pro on the Plugins page of your site. If you don't see this plugin listed on your site, please contact your Website administrator or tickets@gsu.uservoice.com.

After the plugin is installed, you can access the Smush Pro settings under MEDIA > WP SMUSH

Change the settings to the following: 
  • Automatically smush my images on upload: ON
  • WP Smush will optimize the following image sizes: CHECK ALL BOXES
  • Preserve image EXIF data: OFF
  • Resize original images: ON
  • Max Width: 2000px
  • Max Height: 1280 px
  • Super-smush my images: ON
  • Include my original full-size images: ON
  • Make a copy of my original images: OFF
  • Convert PNG to JPEG (lossy): ON

This operation may take up to a few hours, depending on the amount of images on your site.

When complete, leave WP Smush Pro activated so that new images will be auto-smushed.

Then activate the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin. If any images were changed from PNG to JPG, the thumbnails may be off, and the images may not display on the site anymore. Correct this by either going into MEDIA > LIBRARY and looking for broken images and selecting "Regenerate Thumbnails" for each one, or if there are a lot of broken images, open up TOOLS > REGEN THUMBNAILS and then select "Regenerate All Thumbnails."  Regenerating all thumbnails will take a long time and should only be performed after business hours.

After the Thumbnails have all been regenerated, deactivate the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin.

Document Manager and DropBox


Another way that we save storage space on our sites is to move all of your documents (PDF, MS Word, Excel, etc.) to a specially-created website DropBox for your department/college/school and then link them to the Document Manager plugin already on your site.




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