Khaled Khan 2 years ago
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When it comes to maintaining your website in good shape and functioning quickly, WordPress database optimization is crucial. Things like these have a simple way of adding up to large numbers of rows over time. This has happened numerous times than we could ever count. You should maintain the database on your WordPress site in the same way as you would your automobile. 

The site contents and the data are the two primary parts that make up a WordPress site. The WordPress core files, as well as photos, plugins, and theme files, are all contained in the web server files. The base, plugins and theme settings, content, digital files, and metatables are all contained in the database. Similarly, WordPress database optimization can allow your website to reply to your queries considerably faster.

A constantly expanding database may also increase your hosting provider’s costs for disc space. So, saving money might be another benefit of optimizing. As a result, we offer a variety of options for clearing out and getting rid of old data, including modifications, auto-drafts, junk mail comments, transients, and more. 

If you constantly optimize the WordPress database, your database will grow over time. Every WordPress site needs database plugins, and you need them to maintain your site healthy and optimized. There are several database plugins available, such as cache plugins, lazy loading plugins, minifying plugins, etc., that let you give your WordPress website a unique twist.

Owning a website is not an easy task. It requires a lot of patience and effort. The finest WordPress database plugins must be used to manage your website. 

Do you realize how important website speed is to how well your site performs in search engine results? Your article will have a high bounce rate if it takes too long to load. You’ll learn What is database optimization, how it works, and Which DB is best for WordPress? in this article. 

We’ll go over the many sorts of WordPress issues and queries like Is WordPress good for databases? or How do I reduce the size of my WordPress database, and how to optimize your website manually or automatically. With many settings and options from plugins, themes, and content, your database will naturally grow in size as your website grows. If you don’t perform WordPress MySQL optimization, you’ll soon notice a slowdown.

WordPress Core Database Table Setup

Although you may see more than 11 tables listed in your database, WordPress contains 11 core tables that store all the information on your website. Because WordPress themes and plugins can construct their respective tables, this is the case. The 11 fundamental tables that come with WordPress by default, as well as the types of data they hold, are listed below.

Is it required to optimize WordPress Database?

The data storage in the WP tables is crucial and necessary for your WordPress to operate effectively, whether or not they raise the server load. Therefore, the crucial query is: Why does the WordPress Database need to be cleaned up? You must be familiar with WordPress’ primary workings in order to comprehend this. 

Those post modifications of previous posts pile up across your database and raise the server burden every time you change a blog and save a draft, storing revision data that is no longer necessary. The essential data for your website is all stored in the WP database. However, if the upkeep is neglected, this storage facility may swell and begin to slow down your website. Hence, WP database optimization is crucial to enhancing the functionality of your website.

What makes WordPress Database to be Filled and to get empty

Following an extensive investigation, we have provided some of the causes and solutions for all readers. As was already said, the extra fat makes your website slower and less efficient. So why not entirely resolve this issue and improve the WordPress database?

Typically, a website gets a huge amount of spam comments. And, it is a common issue that has to be resolved right away to ensure the seamless operation of your website. Spam comments take up a lot of database space if your website has plenty of them. WordPress or maybe one of your extensions will flag a remark for your approval if it believes it is spam. 

The message will also be kept in your WordPress dashboard’s Comments > Spam section: A competent anti-spam plugin can detect and stop the amount of spammers using your account, minimize bloat, and assist improve the WordPress database, which is the current answer to this issue.

After 30 days, WordPress will automatically remove these comments. They will, however, occupy space in your treasured database in the meanwhile. By selecting the offending comments and selecting the Empty Spam option, you may quickly erase spam comments. Another option is to launch phpMyAdmin and issue the following command:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = ‘spam’

If you’re currently utilizing phpMyAdmin for another purpose and would prefer not to access your WordPress dashboard, this approach could be better. If not, it could be overly complex. Some WordPress anti-spam plugins can also help you remove spam comments permanently. For instance, without demanding an approval procedure, the Akismet plugin may automatically screen and delete dubious material from your database.

All of your posts and pages have revisions stored in your WordPress database. When you wish to trace editing changes or go back to prior iterations of your material, this collection comes in useful. However, your database may get quite crowded as a result of these updates. In addition, a lot of posts and pages will have hundreds of them. So, technically, this might result in speedy and unwanted database bloat if you have a large website or if you make updates regularly. Additionally, a new record with the post type value of revision is added to the wp post table in the WordPress database each time a revision is produced. There are currently two approaches to solving this problem. WordPress modifications should either be deleted or limited.

Another outrageous error that many people wind up making is this one. When building a website, it’s common to make errors and have to delete previously published posts, articles, or other uploaded information. Because you occasionally remove a particular post or blog by mistake and can recover it, these deleted articles are automatically placed in the waste bin of your WordPress website. These removed entries do not, however, instantaneously vanish from your database. They will remain in the trash folder on your website for 30 days. You may also want to think about clearing your database’s garbage more frequently if you regularly delete a lot of objects. Thankfully, you can quickly shorten the time that removed entries remain in your database. You’ll just need to modify your wp-config.php file.

Then, add the below code to the file:

define( ‘EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS’, X )

You’ll enter the number of days until removed items are permanently wiped from your WordPress database in place of “X.” For five days, you may type “5”, for example. Afterward, save your modifications and submit the revised file again to your website.

Did you notice that WordPress’s database houses 99 percent of the data related to plugins and themes? You’ll be shocked to learn that even after deleting or uninstalling a certain plugin, the information is still kept and is not removed, which, as was already said, adds to the bloat. Additionally, this leads to a problem with database optimization. You could experiment with just a few alternative themes and plugins while creating a website to see which ones you enjoy the most. The consumer will keep the best-fitting one while deactivating and deleting the others. Ensure to go ahead and delete any plugins you aren’t using if this isn’t the case.

Ways to Optimize Your WP Database Manually

You must access PHPMyAdmin through your hosting company to manually optimize your WordPress website. Go to Databases in the PHPMyAdmin utility after logging into your cPanel account. Then choose the database you want to improve. A database optimization query may be executed directly from the phpMyAdmin interface. The programme that enables you to view your uncooked database is called PhpMyAdmin. From the Databases section in your hosting account’s cPanel, you can access phpMyAdmin. Open the database for your WordPress site in phpMyAdmin and look for the tables you wish to optimize. 

The “Choose All” option is an additional choice. Scroll down the drop-down menu that is located here, just below the tables. Run the query after selecting the Optimize table option from the Table maintenance group. The “OPTIMIZE TABLE” command is executed on your database via the Optimize table option. Within the same phpMyAdmin option, you may also execute the REPAIR TABLE query, which “repairs a potentially damaged table,” in addition to OPTIMIZE TABLE.

Plugins that are required to Optimize Your Database

You have plenty of excellent plugins available that can help you maintain your WordPress database. Such tools make it simple and painless to keep a site up to date. They will assist you in getting started and making recommendations. The majority of the plugins are simple to install. This tutorial will go through WP-Optimize, WP Rocket, WP-Optimize, and WP-Sweep in depth.

A free plugin called WP-Optimize handles all types of improvements for your WordPress website. In addition to clearing your database, it compresses your photos and caches your website’s content. Feature of its database cleanup – Eliminates any unused information, including expired transients that are buried in the wp-options table, all of your MySQL tables are optimized, allows you to perform routine automated cleanups, displays data statistics, and more. If you wish to do regular cleanups on a regular basis, the plugin is a solid and secure option because it is constantly updated and the support staff is helpful.

Another database cleaning plugin for areas like comments, post information, and revisions is WP-Sweep. As was said previously, because there isn’t an official trash function for the WordPress database, your database accumulates all kinds of trash that is sometimes logged as just an archive or is just left around. In conclusion, there is no excuse for not performing a monthly database clean-up, and the WP-Sweep plugin may assist you in doing so. You may clean away everything to increase efficiency and relieve server load, from deleted comments to inactive phrases. Because that is all that this plugin does, it is a simple and efficient way to clean up the mess.

Breeze is a WordPress optimizer plugin created by Cloudways that is small and powerful. It is a free plugin that is pre-installed with Cloudways’ WordPress installation. After the plugin has been installed and turned on, go to Settings Breeze Database Options and either select Clean All of the optimization options chosen. After making your choice, click the Optimize button, and WordPress will clean up its database.

How to Use Wp-Optimize to Optimize Your WordPress Database

Introduction about wp-optimize

A further WordPress plugin for database optimization is WP-Optimize. The WordPress database is efficiently and constantly cleaned. This plugin may be installed and turned on from your WordPress admin area. Additionally, it provides a variety of choices for deleting unwelcome modifications, comments, articles, and temporary options. After making your choice, press the “Run all chosen optimizations” button to launch the procedure.

Pros and Cons

FAQs Regarding WordPress Database Optimization

Ans – You must access PHPMyAdmin through your hosting company in order to manually optimize your WordPress website. Go to Databases in the PHPMyAdmin utility after logging into your cPanel account. Then choose the database you want to improve. Then, to optimize all tables, select Check All.

Ans – The WP-Optimize WordPress plugin includes an image compression tool that uses the latest lossless compression technology. It compresses image files such as JPG, PNG, GIF, TIF, and BMP. By freeing up space on the server, the function speeds up the page’s loading time.

Ans – Database tuning is necessary for organizing and accessing database data with ease. Database tuning, often known as performance tuning, entails improving and homogenizing the database file and database environment designs. This may make data access more convenient than you anticipated.

Ans – Posts, pages, comments, categories, tags, custom fields, users, and other WordPress settings are all kept in a WordPress database.

Ans – A simple WP blog’s MySQL database is roughly 10 MB (Megabytes). This assumes you haven’t installed any plugins and are running the most recent version of WordPress.

To conclude, depending on your level of technical expertise, you may either manually improve your WordPress database using a program like phpMyAdmin or utilize a WordPress database optimization tool. When refining your WordPress database, it’s crucial to get rid of outdated WordPress revisions, all trash comments from your website, the junk folder in WordPress, and obsolete plugins and themes that add to database bloat. 

If you want to keep your site’s data in excellent shape, database optimization is a crucial operation that you must carry out on a regular basis. Either utilize a database recovery plugin to customize and organize the entire process, or perform the optimization manually. Additionally, you may provide your clients with a standard maintenance service called database optimization.


About Khaled Khan

Khaled Khan is a WordPress developer who has been working in the industry for over six years now. He's currently employed as a Senior Engineer at Sizmic Labs, where he helps build a WordPress community of both developers and site owners. When Khaled isn't busy with work you can find him watching survival shows (the crazier ones are always better) cooking up something new in his kitchen -- or out exploring new places to eat in and around Hyderabad.

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