Cleaning Out Your #WordPress Database
Howdy. Let’s talk about size. Specifically the size of your WordPress database. Size does matter. Regardless of what you’ve been told.
If you database gets too large and full of junk it can slow down your site. I’ve embarked on a voyage of discovery. The goal being to clean up and trim down my WordPress databases. Here are my experiences so far with two plugins.
| WP-Optimize |
This plugin helps you to keep your database clean by removing post revisions and spams in a blaze. Additionally it allows you to run optimize command on your WordPress core tables (use with caution). |
and
| WPDBSpringClean |
A WordPress Plugin which deletes unused plugin tables from the database and also allows you to optimize existing DB tables |
WPDBSpringClean.
I have quite the collection of WordPress websites and I’ve turned on and turned off many plugins over the years. Removing a plugin doesn’t always remove it’s data. That data may become orphaned in your WordPress database. This is important because more content in your database means your server is working harder and your website is slower.
My oldest website is On The Fly Photography. I used WPDBSpringClean on my database over there and
1. It didn’t break anything. That’s critical. Tho I did backup my database before using WPDBSpringClean and you should do the same.
2. It reduced the size of my datatbase from 45M to 12.6M. That was a crap ton of useless data.
I used it on another of my sites and reduced the database from 49M to 9.8M. Another huge reduction of CPU wasting overhead. Getting all that unused data out of your database will:
- Make your WordPress site run faster.
- Make your backups smaller.
- Reduce the likelihood of problems in the future.
It’s easy to do and worth it.
WP-Optimize:
WP-Optimize will do a number of things such as removing old post & page revisions, clean out auto drafts, empty the trash, and remove spam.
It can be set to run automatically. I haven’t tried doing this yet as I’m not that trusting. I prefer to do things that involve tweaking my database manually. A feature I like is the ability to turn comments and trackbacks on or off – and it will affect all your previously published posts.
You can also view information about individual tables in your WordPress database.
WP-Optimize didn’t make near as much difference to the size of my databases. Mostly because I keep spam and revisions cleaned up on a regular basis. There wasn’t much for this plugin to do on my sites. Still it’s worth installing and using to see what you can get from it. If you have not been cleaning out spam and revisions this plugin will make a difference with your database.
Remember to backup your WordPress database before you test either of these plugins on your site.