The ultimate guide to removing connections on LinkedIn

If you're like most LinkedIn users, you want to add connections on LinkedIn. It feels satisfying when you see your number of followers and connections tick up day after day, week after week.

What I wish more business owners knew is this: having more connections often doesn’t mean securing more clients. 

In fact, having irrelevant connections can hurt your reach, crowd your feed with irrelevant content, and confuse your messaging. If you want to find clients on LinkedIn, consider removing (in addition to adding!) connections.

This likely comes across as counterintuitive, so I'll explain why in this blog post.

Who should remove connections

If you don't have 500 connections yet, don't worry about removing connections!

If you have more than 500 connections and your network is filled with random people—such as those from past jobs, high school classmates, or those in countries and professions you don’t serve—consider removing connections. We want your network to be filled with relevant folks.

Why you should remove connections

One sign that you should remove connections is that, despite posting consistent, high-quality content, your engagement is lower than you think it should be. When you have a refined network, your content will be sent to relevant people. When your content is sent to relevant people, they engage with it, so the algorithm sends it to more relevant people. 

On the flip side, when your network isn't refined, your content is sent to irrelevant people. Since the content is irrelevant to them, they don't engage with it, telling the algorithm not to send it to more people.

As a side benefit, you'll write better content when your network is refined because you'll know exactly who you're writing it for. As a result, your ideal clients will resonate more with your content, making it easier to attract and secure client contracts. 

And lastly, when you have a refined network, your feed becomes more relevant, making it easier to engage with relevant folks, helping you build strong relationships. And as we all know, good relationships result in referrals, which results in clients. 

How to remove connections without getting blocked

As of the writing of this blog post (March 2025), you can remove up to 250 connections a day, but I recommend playing it safe and capping it at 100 per day to avoid any issues with LinkedIn or changing rules of the platform.

When you're ready to get started, use LinkedIn’s search feature in your connections list to spot irrelevant connections. This does NOT require a premium LinkedIn subscription! 

Here are a few examples of how you can search out these connections to remove:

🔍 Search for job titles that aren’t relevant to you (e.g., “engineer” if you never work with engineers, or "student" if you never work with students).

🔍 Search by location if you’re only targeting people in specific areas.

🔍 Search for profiles that are inactive (i.e. no profile picture, no recent engagement, no work experience listed). 

The next steps you can take to get leads on LinkedIn

I want you to form a thoughtful yet simple LinkedIn strategy that gets you leads. As you can tell from reading this article, success likely won't come from growing your number of connections.

Instead, it will come from writing high-quality content and sending strategic messages to your prospects.

Here's how I can help you:

Step 1: When I start working with a small business owner, we always start with a Profile Optimization so that you clearly explain your credibility, who you serve, how you serve them, and what action the profile viewer should take.

This process takes about 3 weeks from start to finish, and provides you a profile that captures the attention of your ideal clients and gets them to take action.

Step 2: Once your profile is optimized, we then create your LinkedIn strategy so you can get visible to the right audience and attract more interest in your offerings through my coaching program Leads on LinkedIn.

This two-month program focuses on two main skills: LinkedIn posting and direct messaging. These skills bring the right clients into your orbit so you can consistently grow your business without relying on time-consuming strategies like video and expensive strategies like ads. 

Within just a month, you'll have identified and contacted 30 prospects for your business. You'll have the skills and systems to do it again whenever you want an influx of leads. And, this rinse-and-repeat process gets more effective every time you do it!

Step 3: After, we create a habit of LinkedIn marketing through my coaching program so that you can count on ongoing leads for your business. We integrate LinkedIn with your other marketing strategies (e.g. email and in-person networking) to prevent duplicate work and create a reliable marketing ecosystem.

Learn more and get started here.