Disable Media Pages vs Autoremove Attachments

Autoremove Attachments helps you keep the Media Library clean by deleting all media files attached as child attachments to a post, page, or custom post type when the parent is deleted. By default, when you delete content from your website, regardless if it’s a post, a page, a product, or any kind of post type, WordPress keeps the media files previously associated with it, even if after the removal of your content they are not used anywhere else. Autoremove Attachments tries to solve this problem by automating the removal of all media files that have a child-parent relationship with the removed content. (so you don’t have to manually track and remove orphan files left on your server) Important Considerations A soft delete that places your post, page, or custom post type in Trash will not trigger the removal of its child attachments. The purge happens when you empty your trash. When you delete a post, page or custom post type, we try to determine if its child attachments are used anywhere else on your website. If they are, we do not remove them, to prevent broken links. The additional checks before the automatic removal can be disabled from the Media Settings for improved performance on large websites with thousands of posts and media files. The plugin only removes files tracked by WordPress. Some poorly coded themes generate additional thumbnail sizes that are not tracked by WordPress and this always leads to orphan files left on your server. Compatibility and Third-Party Support WooCommerce Easy Digital Downloads All themes and plugins that do things the WordPress way If you use a plugin to optimize and clean your database of revisions, trashed posts, etc, make sure you use one that relies on native WordPress functions to perform the maintenance tasks. We recommend WP-Sweep.

Completely disable “attachment” pages created by WordPress. By default, WordPress creates a page for each of your attachments. This is can be undesirable because of two reasons: Search engine optimization Attachment pages don’t have any content, except an image, so they provide little value and can negatively affect your SEO because they are so-called thin content. Even worse, attachment pages may in some cases rank higher than your actual content pages which leads to a poor user experience. Reserved slugs Attachment pages can accidentally reserve slugs on your site. Let’s say you upload an image named contact.jpeg, an attachment page https://example.com/contact is automatically created. If you then try to create a page named Contact, the URL for that page will be https://example.com/contact-2 which isn’t that great. How it works This plugin works by automatically setting all attachment slugs to an unique id, so they won’t conflict with your pages. If an attachment page is accessed, the plugin will set a 404 status code and display the “page not found” template. You can also mangle any existing attachment slugs so they won’t cause any issues in the future. WP CLI support The plugin supports WP CLI. Mangle existing attachment slugs wp disable-media-pages mangle Restore attachment slugs wp disable-media-pages restore Note for WordPress 6.4 WordPress 6.4 includes a new feature that allows you to disable attachment pages. However, this feature redirects attachment pages to the file URL instead of returning a 404 error. To completely disable attachment pages, you should use this plugin instead. The WP 6.4 feature also does not fix the issue where attachment pages reserve slugs for pages. Also, there is not user interface to enable or disable media pages, they are automatically disabled for new sites but remain enabled for existing sites. Because of these issues, I recommend you to use this plugin instead of the built-in feature. The plugin will be updated in the foreseeable future, at least until attachment pages are completely removed from WordPress core and older WordPress versions are no longer in use. Thanks Special thanks to Greg Schoppe for his research and inspiration that helped a lot with developing this plugin. Support the plugin Maintaining a WordPress plugin is a lot of work. If you like the plugin, please consider rating it on WordPress.org. You can also support me on GitHub sponsors. Thank you! If you are interested, you can also check out my other WordPress plugins: Disable Customizer Disable Drop Cap ACF Image Aspect Ratio Crop