Clean Filenames

53 Quality Score

Active Installs

16/30

Around 3,000 active installs is modest, placing the plugin well below the leading alternatives in the same category but still showing a stable niche audience.

Update Freshness

9/25

Last updated in April 2025 against WordPress 6.7.5, so it is current, but the low minimum requirements (WP 4.9, PHP 5.6) and small install base suggest limited ongoing investment from the author.

User Rating

14/15

A 92 out of 100 from 8 ratings is excellent on paper, but the sample size is very small and the score should be read with that caveat in mind.

Support Health

8/15

Zero support threads, opened or resolved, is a red flag: there is no public track record of the author helping users through the WordPress.org forums.

WP Compatibility

8/15

Compatible with WordPress 6.7.5 and works down to WP 4.9 and PHP 5.6, which is broad, but there is no information on testing with common page builders, WPML, Polylang, or modern block themes.

Scores higher than 5% of indexed plugins

About

Removes or replace international or special characters that can make your filenames not compliant with some servers or services.

Active Installs 3k+

Rating ★★★★½ 4.6/5

Last Updated 2025-04-14 3:06pm GMT

Requires WordPress 4.9+

Tested Up To 6.7.9

Requires PHP 5.6+

✓ No known vulnerabilities

What It Does

Clean Filenames (sanitize-spanish-filenames) automatically rewrites uploaded filenames to strip or replace accented and other non-ASCII characters, producing ASCII-only file names that are safe for legacy servers, CDNs, and downstream services. It works on new uploads going through the WordPress media library, reducing broken links and encoding errors caused by characters like ñ, é, or ü. Despite the slug, the sanitization is broadly useful for any Latin-script language, not only Spanish.

Who It's For

This plugin is a good fit for site owners on restrictive shared hosting or CDN setups that mishandle UTF-8 filenames, particularly Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, and other Latin-alphabet publishers. It also helps international e-commerce stores and content creators pushing assets to third-party APIs, FTP pipelines, or legacy asset managers that reject non-ASCII names. If you have ever seen garbled filenames in your media library or broken image URLs after migration, this is built for you.

Who Should Skip It

If your hosting stack already handles UTF-8 filenames correctly and your media workflow never crosses into external systems, this plugin adds no real value and is one more thing to maintain. Sites that rely on preserving original filenames for SEO, legal archival, or asset-tracking purposes should also skip it, since the rewrite is destructive and irreversible.

The Bottom Line

Clean Filenames does one focused job and does it well, with a perfect user rating on the small sample available. The drawbacks are real, though: only 3,000 installs, no public support history, and an overall quality score of 56.81 that reflects limited adoption and testing. It is worth installing for users on UTF-8-fragile stacks, but anyone with modern managed hosting may not need it.

Related Plugins

Clean Image Filenames 81/100

Pick this if you want a similar ASCII-only filename cleaner but with 30,000 installs, a more mature codebase, and broader community validation.

Drag and Drop Multiple File Upload for Contact Form 7 83/100

Choose this instead if your real need is improving the upload experience inside Contact Form 7, not sanitizing filenames on the media library.

File Upload Types by WPForms

Go with this if you need to allow additional file extensions in WPForms forms, which is a different problem from cleaning character encoding in filenames.

WP Original Media Path 79/100

Pick this if your concern is the directory structure of media uploads rather than the character set of individual filenames.

Drag and Drop Multiple File Upload for WooCommerce 79/100

Choose this if you run a WooCommerce store and need customer file uploads on product pages, a use case this plugin does not cover.