Trying to get a fresh install without messing up posts

  • Hi, I have a website that I’ve been casually working on off and on for years now, but have never really done much with. I’ve used several themes and ended up with a lot of junk everywhere.

    I now want to redo it from scratch, with a completely fresh start, and keep it really lean and fast.

    I backed up the posts using WP’s export tool, deleted my WP install, and deleted the database. I then set it all up from scratch, and thought this would accomplish my goal.

    I had an issue where the images in the posts weren’t in the media folder but were being linked from the original folder, and I fixed that last night by manually downloading all the images, importing them to my media folder, and then deleting the old links and inserting the new images into my posts.

    However, it appears that I still have a bunch of leftovers from my old installs – when I used All-in-One WP Migration to take a back up, it was 5gb! I went into my files through my host and deleted everything dated prior to my recent install, but it’s still sitting at 3gb which doesn’t make any sense to me.

    I only have about 17 posts and all the images are compressed and quite small. Aside from those posts, it’s just a clean install of Astra with an imported demo site, with only a couple of minor changes so far.

    How can I achieve my goal of having a completely fresh start? I assume my problem is that I deleted the WP install and database, but didn’t then delete the whole folder for that site with my host, meaning when I reinstalled it it had all the old junk there again…

    I’m not adverse to starting over again, but I want to make sure I do it right this time.

    I’d also love to be able to save the images from my posts with their titles and tags, as it took me hours last night to import and rename them all. Exporting and importing the posts doesn’t seem to work properly.

    I hope that all made sense. I’m definitely still a beginner at all this! Thanks in advance for any assistance.

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  • Thread Starter getageta

    (@getageta)

    Update:

    I’ve decided that as the formatting of the posts is all screwed up anyway, and there aren’t that many, I’ll redo them from scratch. I have the photos saved in a folder and the post text in a local file.

    Given I no longer want to save the posts, is the correct way to get my desired fresh start to:

    1 – Uninstall WP
    2 – Delete the database
    3 – Use file manager to delete the entire existing public_html folder
    4 – Reinstall WP with a new database?

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