Note: This article is a backup of https://unrealcommunity.wiki/cleaning-your-project-d4s8khfl in case the wiki gets discontinued like its predecessor. The original article is under AGPL-3.0 license and the github repo can be found at https://github.com/catalystsoftworks/unreal-community-wiki. The contents of the article was not modified, I just translated it over to markdown to use it in hugo. The article also says UE4, but the process also applies to UE5 as well.

Cleaning Your Project

 Upon opening a project UE4 will generate various files and folders if they do not already exist. Some of these can be deleted to reduce the project size when archiving or sharing the project.

 Reducing Project Sizes

 Upon opening a project UE4 will generate various files and folders if they do not already exist:

.vs

Binaries

DerivedDataCache

Intermediate

Plugins/*/Intermediate (any Intermediate folder inside a plugin)

Saved

ProjectName.sln (only if your project has a c++ code in it)

 These files and folders can be deleted to reduce the total size of your project when archiving, sharing and/or moving the project. They are often times also excluded from source control using a .ignore list for example.

 The Binaries folder inside of plugins should not be deleted as they might contain pre-built libraries of which the source code is not distributed with the plugin and therefore cannot be regenerated on demand.