Recently we were asked by a client how best to go through their Joomla CMS website and clean out old content that might be lingering from previous iterations of their website, or unfinished blog posts, and even some older content that was showing up on google search that they no longer wanted appearing. Here is a run down of what we suggested they do to spring clean the content from their Joomla website, and the same strategy can be applied for cleaning out old menu items, modules and content from 3rd party Joomla extensions too.

Managing Joomla Trash

A good strategy I find is to delete anything currently in the trash on the assumption that if it's been sitting in the trash for a while and nobody has complained or there have been no issues then it is very likely these items are actual trash and are no longer needed. That gives us an empty trash as a base point for spring cleaning. In Joomla, there are separate trashes for Content items, Menu items, and Modules and it's very useful to have these separated out like this but the clean up strategy is the same for each. I'll call all of the things in each of these areas 'items'. Before you proceed remember it's always a good idea to manually run a Joomla backup before embarking on any significant changes in your Joomla website.