The problem: I’ve got my WordPress blog site running on Local, but the Staatic plugin takes a long time to publish to Netlify
(For more info about this process, see my post about converting my WordPress sites to static sites hosted on Netlify)
The site is not huge or complicated, so I started digging…
(Side note: it wasn’t the unused media and it wasn’t trashing all the comments, though deleting them did feel amazing and I highly recommend it)
The culprit: hundreds of tags
WordPress makes it easy to edit and remove Tags – just navigate to Posts on the left and open the Tags section. This slow-to-publish site had a good 250+ tags, most of which were in use by either 0 or 1 post, and almost all of which weren’t even useful (the me of 2014 who made all those tags was just doing her best).
I deleted the vast majority of the tags, and now the site exports in ~2 minutes.
TL;DR: delete all your excess WP tags and Staatic might publish faster