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Cleaning up a website feels like cleaning out a basement full of ghosts and bad decisions. You tell yourself you’ll get to it “when things slow down,” which is hilarious because things never do. So there I was, knee-deep in forgotten code and digital cobwebs, swinging a metaphorical shovel through years of garbage. Drafts from 2018 that read like caffeine-induced therapy sessions. Links that lead straight into the void. Plugins that seem possessed by some long-abandoned WordPress spirit.
So I started deleting everything. No hesitation, no “just in case” backup folder—straight into the pit. That half-assed redesign from when I thought I knew CSS? Deleted. That blog post about minimalism that secretly tracked more analytics than a government agency? Obliterated.
And you know what? It feels righteous. There’s something beautifully destructive about ripping down your own digital walls. Not that fake punk stuff where people act rebellious between Instagram posts. Real punk: destroy what’s dull, rebuild what matters, leave the cracks showing. I don’t want sterile or streamlined; I want the chaos that actually looks like me.
Sure, I could’ve paid some “branding expert” to make my site “efficient,” but I’d rather be the one swinging the broom. When I break something—and I absolutely will—I’ll know which half-melted line of code did it.
The purge isn’t about perfection. It’s about reclaiming ownership. One haunted plugin, one cringe post, one dusty relic at a time. The site might still be messy, but at least it’s my mess again.
4 responses
I dig the redesign! I’ve got a long-running one going myself, hopefully for launch in 2026, with a similar goal: more personal authenticity, less designing to what people expect. Having an independent web presence is totally punk rock.
I shan’t be ditching old posts though; that’s not my jam. I’ve got posts going back to… what… 1998 or so? And while the old stuff (and especially the REALLY old stuff, back when I was a teenager!) is pretty shit, it’s MY shit. (And it’s on archive.org and who knows where else, so “hiding” it feels disingenuous, to me: I’d rather keep my dirty laundry where everybody can see it: at least them I can put a disclaimer on it!)
But I can see the temptation behind a ruthless purge. Regression-testing 25+ years of blog posts when I decide to do something radical like (as I was this weekend) reimplementing my image lightbox is… a bit of a drag, and I’m unlikely to do it very well! Such is the risk with maintaining web pages that are probably older than most people that read them!
Hopefully this is the final purge — for real this time. I’m aiming for simplicity, like you said — more personal, less cluttered. There’s a lot of crap going on at both jobs, especially the first one, and I’d rather not hand anyone ammo to talk shit. So yeah, I wiped it all clean just to be safe. We all need money.
;>) Been there, Eric.
Hi there