In all this time battling with databases, one thing has remained constant, you have to manage your databases constantly and sometimes that means cleanup and maintenance. WordPress databases are no different.
Why clean your WordPress database?
One of the most important reasons to perform a WordPress database cleanup is because the database is the second slowest part of your entire system. The only thing slower is the file system itself. Therefore, making sure your database is operating at an optimal speed is important not only for the health of your site but also for search engine rankings. Most major search engines use page load speed to rank the page. For optimal WordPress performance, you want to keep your database clean. Cleaning your WordPress database is one part of the overall WordPress performance tuning process.
The vast majority of WordPress installations use a MySQL (or MariaDB) relational database management system. This is what we'll focus on in this article. Still, most of the tips can be applied to any type of storage your WordPress database uses.
Steps to follow for an optimal cleaning of the WordPress database
Create a backup before you start
Before you embark on this journey, make sure you create a new backup . Yes, you should have at least 30 daily backups, but there are things that might have changed since your last backup. You'll want to make sure that if something breaks, you can easily restore everything to how it was before you started.
If your web host offers on-demand backups like SiteGround does, do one now. Otherwise, before you continue, install a plugin that allows you to create and restore backups of your database.
There are many good plugins out there that will help you. I have worked with several and reviewed others. For this job, creating backups and restoring, I like UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin because it has a very easy to understand restore function. The free version will be enough to get the job done but the paid version adds many other useful features (like WP-CLI support… which is very important to me in most plugins).
Once you have the plugin installed, proceed to make a backup. Unless you are going to delete files, it is not necessary to make a backup of everything, just make a copy of the database.
After you've made your backup, perform a restore so you can see how it works before you get into an emergency situation. Remember, if you have an untested recovery system, you don't have a disaster recovery system, you have hopes and wishes.
Leftover tables in the WordPress database
Now that you have your backup system in place, the first thing you might want to bring in is a developer. I'm a big fan of bringing in professional help when I'm overloaded, and this task could overwhelm a lot of people.
If your site has been online for a long time, you may have installed and uninstalled a lot of plugins. My personal site has been using WordPress since 2005. Many plugins, especially older ones, did not perform cleanups on themselves. This means that during installation, they could create tables in your database that were not deleted when you uninstalled the plugin. Take a look at the list of tables (if you don't know how, you shouldn't be doing this without help) and try to identify any that are not in use. Delete those tables from your database.
Once you have removed them, test EVERYTHING. It is these operations that make me recommend having a staging environment to test these things in the test environment. Still, if you have your backup, you are good to go.
I checked my personal website database about a year or so ago. There are over 500 tables. The standard WordPress installation has about 40. I really need to take the time to clean things up myself.
There are plugins that will help you with this task if you don't have a developer who can help you. One of them is mentioned below, WP-Optimize .
Don't be alarmed if you get an error when you try to delete a table. The database user WordPress is running from may not (and probably SHOULD NOT) have sufficient permissions to delete these tables. You can still show this list to your developer and they will know how to safely delete these tables.
Reviews
Next, we'll talk about post revisions. As you're working on a post or page, WordPress is constantly saving it in the background. To allow you to go back and restore one of those versions at a later date, each revision is saved as a separate record in the post database. Once you've finished editing your post and published it, these revisions are of no use.
If you have a developer on your team, they can remove these records from the table without having to install any plugins. If you don't have a developer, or want to make a change that will keep this issue resolved, check out WP Revisions Control . This simple plugin will allow you to set how many revisions to keep and will keep your database clean automatically.
Drafts
Another source of useless content in your database is posts you started but never got around to publishing. Again, using my personal website as an example, I looked at it once and it had over 50 posts in DRAFT status. This means that not only do I have 50 records in my database that I don't need, but there are revisions for every single one of them. Get rid of those old posts that you're never going to publish.
Empty the trash
As an administrator of a WordPress installation, you need to delete new zealand whatsapp number data old posts, pages, and other things. WordPress doesn't automatically delete those old posts from your system, it moves them to the 'trash'. (From a technical perspective, it changes the status of these items.)
The trash is great if you need to go back and retrieve something later but after a certain amount of time, you can be sure that you won't need what's in the trash. So empty the trash. When you do, you'll remove the items that WordPress marked as trash. This removes them from the database and prevents them from piling up.
Things not to worry about
There are a lot of recommendations on what you should do to clean up your WordPress database on the Internet. Some of these tips are well-intentioned but not that helpful. Here are a couple of things you don't need to worry about.
Clean up temporary files
Transients are small pieces of information that WordPress and plugins need to store temporarily. Transients have an expiration date. Some people will advise you to make sure you clean up expired transients from time to time. Don't bother. WordPress' cron system will do this for you every night. At best, you can delete a few hundred records a few hours early. The effort you put into managing transients is effort that could be bet
