The “huge website” was 14% of the number the client was reading
The client saw one figure in their hosting panel and reached straight for the product images — the only irreversible move on the list.
Editorial blog · 1,773 posts · shared hosting, one of 26 domains on the account
Measured 2026-09-05. The site is never named — see our policy on client anonymity below.
What changed, measured
| Measurement | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site size | 1,940.5 MB | 1,710.3 MB | -12% |
| Account-level waste | 274.6 MB | 0 MB | -100% |
| Zero-risk reclaim | 0 MB | 505 MB | new |
How it actually went
The figure that upsets a client is almost never their site's size. It is the account-wide number in the hosting panel — here, 26 domains totalling around 14 GB, of which this site was 14% and not even the largest.
The largest single win was not inside the site at all. A 274.58 MB error log lived above every public_html, and 54% of it was crash traces from a cache drop-in that had been removed weeks earlier.
A cache directory is only live if its feature is enabled. Reading three option keys moved 98 MB from “leave it, it regenerates” straight into the zero-risk tier.
On the media side the ID-only scan flagged 170 orphans. A filename sweep across post content rescued 81 of them. Deleting on the first list would have silently broken 81 live images.
Measure the account before the site, and check the feature flag, not the folder. The safe wins are almost always bigger than the risky ones.
Other measured jobs
276,000 autoloaded rows, loaded on every single page view
276,000 → 1,796Autoloaded options rowsStore C · 2026-09-03Zero of 261 category pages had a meta description
0 → 261Category pages with real meta copyStore D · 2026-08The database was being killed by its own configuration, every 40 minutes
19.63 GB → 1 GBInnoDB buffer pool, on a 3.8 GB serverStore E · 2026-08The plugin installed to make the site faster was the entire reason it was slow
281×slower per cache write, on disk versus in memoryPlans priced on the work,
not on the checklist
Month to month, no lock-in. Prices are per site, per month, exclusive of GST. Portfolios and multi-site estates are quoted on the estate.
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