Both Google and site users love a fast site. Site speed is a ranking factor for most of the major search engines, and users expect a site to load quickly on both mobile and PC. Slow speed can affect your site’s conversions, user experience, and Google rankings, so improving your site’s speed can only help you.
Faster sites indicate good design and coding. They also indicate the state of the database behind your CMS – which is often overlooked because it is not visible.
WordPress (WP) stores all your content in your database, including:
- Pages
- Comments
- Blog Posts
- Theme Settings
- Plugin Settings
- Portfolio Items
- Form Entries
- Links
- Website Settings
- Defragment MYSQL tables.
- Optimize your database without having to manually run queries.
- Removing unnecessary data such as spam comments, pingbacks and backlinks.
- Revisions.
- Deleted posts.
- Comments in pending, spam, or trash can.
- Automatic drafts.
- Pingbacks and backlinks.
- Duplicate meta comments.
- Unused terms.
- Duplicate messages. meta.
- Trash, spam, or pending comments.
- Old versions of posts and pages.
- Orphan messages. meta.
- Old automatic drafts.
If you update your website regularly, the longer you have a WP site, the more data it will have and the larger the database will be. Excessively large databases will affect the performance of your site and take longer to get information for your users.
Since WP stores everything you need in your database AND the many things you don’t, regularly cleaning up your database is essential. By removing unnecessary data, you can improve the performance of your site.
Back up your site
Before you do anything with your database, make sure you back up your site. It’s always better to play it safe than sorry.
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If something goes wrong while cleaning up the database, you can restore a full backup to fix anything that might break during the process.
Optimizing your tables with phpMyAdmin
phpMyAdmin is a free web application and common way to manage your WP database.
This allows you to interact with the MySQL database management system through a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI). If your hosting provides cPanel access, you can access the phpMyAdmin tool from your cPanel under Databases.
Inside your phpMyAdmin dashboard, find and click the database corresponding to the WP website you want to clean up.
You will now have access to all the data tables from the site you want to optimize and clean up. If you have multiple databases and you don’t know which one is correct, open the wp-config.php file by logging into your cPanel and pointing to your file manager.
Take a look at the root folder of the website you want to clean up. Find the wp-config.php file, right-click it and select Modify.
Search for DB_NAME to determine the database name for the site you are working on. After you have defined the name of the database, close the file manager and cPanel.
Log into phpMyAdmin again. Scroll down the list of tables, find and click Select All.
You will see that he is talking to the chosen one. Click Optimize Table. PhpMyAdmin will then automatically launch the defragmentation application.
Delete unused plug-ins and themes
Plugins and themes take up a lot of space in your database. Removing unnecessary files is an easy way to reduce the size of your database.
To find installed plugins, log into your WP dashboard, hover over Plugins and click Installed Plugins.
WP users often test many themes before deciding on a design to use. Have you removed themes you are not using?
To check, go to your WP dashboard and click on Appearance Themes to see if there are multiple.
Even deactivated themes still take up space in your database. This is not the case. Be sure to remove it completely.
Delete old posts
With the Internet, you can be sure of one thing: everything is constantly changing.
Therefore, if you’ve been blogging for years, it is very likely that many of your old posts are no longer relevant or accurate.
Don’t just start deleting obsolete content. You should first audit the content and make sure you are redirecting the URLs of that content before deleting it.
You don’t want to remove any inbound links you may have. You will also want to make sure that anyone who visits your site using this link is taken to the relevant post and not to a “404 page not found” message.
Keep your site up to date
Old versions of WordPress, themes and plugins can damage your website and related database. Problems range from compatibility issues to security holes that can slow down or even break your site.
Some WP designers like to wait for a short while for a new version of WordPress to be released so that any flaws are fixed. Let other people find mistakes so you don’t have to.
Get in the habit of updating WordPress, your theme and all plugins soon after a new version is released.
Use WordPress Plugins
As with most WP needs, there is a plugin for that. WordPress offers many database cleanup plugins to help keep your site clean and uncluttered. Below are some of the more popular and useful ones.
When choosing a plugin you want to make sure it is compatible with your WP version, supported and recently updated.
WP Optimization
WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize is one of the most powerful and effective plugins to clean up your database and improve WP performance. It’s easy to use and mobile friendly.
Some of its features include:
WP Cleanup Optimizer
WP Clean Up Optimizer
If you want to optimize your WordPress site and also remove unnecessary data from your database without using phpMyAdmin, WP Clean Up Optimizer is the plugin for you.
This plugin removed the following things:
Advanced Database Cleaner
Advanced Database Cleaner
When you delete old pages or publish revisions from your WP dashboard, some junk files are left in your database. These files slow down your site.
Advanced Database Cleaner will find these files, also called orphaned items, to reduce the size of your database and improve the speed of your site. It removes the following orphans:
You can also schedule database optimization and automatic start.
Optimizing and cleaning up your WordPress database contributes to the overall performance and speed of your website. This will lead to a better user experience and more search engine traffic.
As stated above, there are several things you can do to organize and clean up your database. For less technical WordPress users, it’s easier to use WP plugins than to work with phpMyAdmin.
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