If you see high inode usage on your cPanel control panel account interface and your website is built using WordPress, you can reduce inode usage by removing unused image files.
WordPress image files
By default, WordPress creates four different copies of an image when you upload it through the media library, they are the following:
- Thumbnail
- Medium size
- Medium-large size
- Large size
In addition to that, plugin and theme developers can also register different sizes and thumbnails of images in their code, and sometimes these remain sitting on your hosting account without you even knowing.
This could eat up a lot of inode capacity on your hosting account.
Stop generating unnecessary thumbnails
We recommend using the Stop Generating Unnecessary Thumbnails plugin to reduce the number of images on your account.
Log in to your WordPress dashboard, and head to Plugins > Add New. Fill in Stop Generating Unnecessary Thumbnails in the search bar at the top-right corner and click the Install Now button:
Activate the plugin:
Image sizes
Next, head to Media > Image Sizes, and select the sizes you want to disable from being generated automatically:
Click Save Settings to save the changes.
This will only help with future images, but we also need to fix the existing duplicated images.
Regenerate thumbnails
To do that, click Regenerate Thumbnails on the same page:
This function will re-generate thumbnails for all existing images and remove the bad sizes previously chosen.
Click Regenerate to go to the next step:
The plugin will let you know once it’s completed with detailed statistics on how many images were processed, removed and re-generated:
