Efficiently optimizing your WordPress site is paramount for optimal performance. Regularly cleaning up your WordPress database is a fundamental practice that can yield noticeable improvements in your site’s speed and responsiveness. Consistent maintenance of this process is essential for sustained performance enhancements.
By “unwanted junk,” we refer to superfluous files that are automatically generated and serve no meaningful purpose within your WordPress database. Retaining such files offers no benefits and can potentially hinder your site’s efficiency. Therefore, it is crucial to identify and eliminate these unnecessary elements to ensure a streamlined and high-performing WordPress website. Regular database cleanups are integral to maintaining an optimal digital environment for your site.
What to CleanUp from WordPress Database to Improve Performance
- Spam Comments
- Revisions
- Deleted comments
- Uninstalled plugin data(files)
- Duplication Comments data
- Deleted Posts
- Auto Drafts
- Tables etc
Now, all unwanted data occupies a lot of space in the database and makes the site heavy. Resulting in your website slows down.
Clear the WordPress Revisions Regularly
Below is an example of WordPress revisions that get created every time you edit the posts. These should be cleaned as the post is published.
Note: These WordPress revisions shown below are from a single post. Just assume the number of revisions it will create for all your posts. And what could be the impact of it on your website if you don’t clear it?
Why someone will require the older WordPress revisions after the post gets published? Isn’t it?
Speeding up the website and maintaining it should be the priority. Deleting all these will result in quicker backups as well.
This can be done only by proper database maintenance. Let’s take a look at how to clean up the WordPress database quickly.
Note: It’s always wise to take a backup of the entire site before putting your hands on modifying something.
Before getting into the process, check out the result it below in the red color in each category. These all are unrequired elements and should be cleared from the WP database.
I am impressed with this process of database optimization.
CleanUp your database and Speed up your WordPress Site
WordPress might offer several plugins for the cleanup of the database. But, according to my experience, I found that WP Sweep and WP Optimize are the best ones so far.
Here we are going to use the WP Sweep to check and clear the increased database size.
This plugin will look into your entire database and filter out each element separately into categories.
- Post Sweep
- Comment Sweep
- User Sweep
- Term Sweep
- Option Sweep
- Database Sweep
How to Cleanup WordPress Database
I was using another plugin to get this done but was impressed after installing WP Sweep. Although, you might want to know how to clean up the WordPress database manually. But, that could be time-consuming and could be a little tricky for new WordPress users. Hence for this tutorial, we are going to use the best plugin to clean the WordPress database for better speed, I came across.
- Step 1. Download and Install the WP-Sweep plugin.
As we can see above those kinds of unused files with a huge number and it slows down the website too.
- Step 2. Once activated it can locate from Tools > Sweep
Now go through one by one to clean up the database individually by hitting the Sweep button.
If you are sure to clear out all unwanted data you can hit the Sweep All button from the bottom of the page, and that will clear all at once.
Note: It is always good to keep the habit of cleaning up the database regularly. It will enhance the performance of the website. And the best part, it just takes a few seconds to do this database sweep. I would say it is better to Add to your To-Do checklist.
Every time you edit any post, a lot of WordPress revisions tables, etc. get created. Which uses resources while the page loads. Which is not required
However, you can limit the revisions as well. But at times while editing post revisions can be a big help for reverting the action if something goes wrong.
Keep a good amount of revisions while writing a post, just in case. But make sure that you clean the WordPress database before publishing it. As you might not require those junk revisions anymore.
You can use any good WordPress database cleanup plugin to do the task. Along with WP-Sweep, my other preferred database plugin is WP-Optimize. Does the job well.
Following this tip would drastically improve the blog’s performance.
Do Let us know which one you are using to clean up the WordPress Database.