In this article, we’ll talk about how to optimize your WordPress database. A crowded database can slow down your site. This can be frustrating for both you and your users. Boosting your website’s performance requires WordPress database optimization strategies. We’ll also explain why it’s important and how to do it!
Why Should I Optimize My WordPress Database?
Your WordPress database is a big part of your website. It holds all of the information that makes up your site and it’s responsible for keeping everything running smoothly. If you don’t optimize your WordPress database, then:
- You may end up with a slow site because there are too many queries being run by the database (i.e., how many times do we need to go back through our posts and get them again).
- You could be experiencing frequent timeouts on some pages because they’re trying to access an element in the database that doesn’t exist anymore (or hasn’t been updated yet).
- And lastly, if you want to make sure nothing bad happens within your WordPress installation—like hacking or lost data—then optimizing this space is essential!
Why and how does your WordPress Database Slows Down?
Your WordPress database is the core of your website, and it will grow over time. You can optimize this database by optimizing your WordPress settings.
In order to keep your site running smoothly and avoid slowdowns, you need to make sure that you’re taking care of these things:
- Don’t delete any tables or their contents; they’re needed for future optimization purposes!
- Optimize everything in the wp_options table (except those whose names start with an underscore). This includes things like default values for options and checkboxes on forms pages as well as custom fields created by plugins or themes—as long as they aren’t used elsewhere on your site then there’s no reason not to optimize them!
How to Optimize Your WordPress Database?
- If you’re looking for a plugin to optimize your database, I recommend the WP-Optimize plugin.
- It’s one of the best plugins available and it works well on its own or in combination with other plugins like BuddyPress or WooCommerce.
- If you don’t want to use a third-party plugin, there are several ways that you can manually optimize your database:
- Standalone Tools – Some free standalone tools that will help speed up site performance include phpMyAdmin, SQL Compare, and SQLite Manager.
Cleaning Up Spam Comments
Spam comments are a waste of space, they can slow down your site and they can be used to spread malware. It’s important to remove them from your database as soon as possible.
You’ll need to remove spam comments by following these steps:
- Go into Settings > Comments and disable all of the options under this section (see screenshot below).
- Click on ‘Spam’ in the left column menu, then select ‘Spam Comment Removal’. This will show you all of the spam comments that have been added recently (see screenshot below). You’ll want to click on each one and then click ‘Delete’. You may also want to check out our guide on how long it takes for WordPress before it deletes old posts from databases!
Cleaning Up Revisions
A revision is a saved version of your website. It’s like a backup, so you can store it on your computer or back it up to the cloud. The process of cleaning up revisions is very simple:
- Open the WordPress dashboard and click on “Posts” in the left sidebar (or go here).
- Click on “Revisions” from here.
- Find any revisions that you want to delete and click the “Delete Revision” button at the bottom of this page.
Cleaning Up Trackbacks and Pingbacks
Trackbacks and Pingbacks are two types of spam that can slow down your website.
These trackbacks look like this:
http://www.example.com/tb/trackback.php?url=http://www.*some*site.*com/blogpost&p=123&title=My+Post&referer=http://wordpresscodex.com
Optimizing Tables with a Plugin
- Use a plugin like WP-Optimize.
- Don’t use a plugin that deletes everything, like WP-Optimize.
- Don’t use a plugin that deletes everything on every site you have.
- wp_links – Stores blogroll links
- wp_term_relationships – Stores associations between posts, categories, and tags, as well as links and link categories
- wp_users – Stores your users
- wp_commentmeta – Stores meta-information about comments
- wp_termmeta – Stores term information called metadata
- wp_terms – Stores post tags and categories for posts and links
- wp_comments – Stores your comments
- wp_term_taxonomy – Stores a description of the taxonomy (category, link, or tag) used in the wp_terms table
- wp_posts – Stores data for posts, pages, and other custom post types
- wp_usermeta – Stores meta-information about users
- wp_postmeta – Stores post meta information.
Optimizing WP-Cron:
WP-Cron is a WordPress feature that allows you to schedule tasks to run at regular intervals. It’s great for things like sending out emails, or running backups and updates on your site. But as it runs every minute, it can cause problems if you have a lot of scheduled tasks running in the background. You can optimize WP-Cron by disabling it for specific posts or pages; this will prevent these tasks from being executed during the time period in which they have been scheduled (or after)
WordPress database optimization is one of the most important things for your site’s performance.
The first thing to remember is that optimizing your WordPress database is important for keeping your site running smoothly. It can be a difficult task, but there are many ways to optimize it.
There are three main things you want to do when optimizing your database:
- Make sure all of the tables are in alphabetical order by name (e.g., user_activation_key)
- Make sure each table has no more than 100,000 rows per table
- Make sure all users have been assigned permissions
Conclusion
We hope this article has given you a better understanding of how to optimize your WordPress database and keep it running smoothly. We also hope that it’s made you more comfortable with the process so that you can use it as part of your regular maintenance routine on any site!
