Optimizing your WordPress database is an essential task that should not be overlooked. As your website grows and you add more content, your database can become cluttered with unnecessary data, causing it to slow down. In this article, we will discuss why it is important to optimize your WordPress database and how to do it effectively.
Why Optimize the WordPress Database?
A smaller and optimized database performs much faster compared to a large, cluttered one. When your database is smaller, WordPress can respond to queries more quickly, resulting in faster performance for both visitors and content creators.
What is “Garbage Data”?
Garbage data refers to information that is not necessary to be stored in the database. Examples of garbage data include comments in the spam queue, unapproved comments, post revisions, and trashed items such as posts and pages.
Out of these, spam comments and post revisions have the most significant impact on the database. If your website receives a moderate number of visitors and has comments enabled, you are likely to have a lot of spam comments. While Akismet filters out the spam and puts it in the spam queue, the comments are still present in the database, taking up valuable space.
Post revisions are created every time you hit the “Save Draft” button while writing a post. This can result in a significant amount of space being wasted in the database. For example, if you save a 50KB article 10 times, you are wasting 450KB of space. Multiply that by the number of long articles on your website, and you can see how much space is being unnecessarily consumed.
How to Optimize the WordPress Database?
One excellent plugin for cleaning and optimizing your WordPress database is WP-Optimize. This plugin has been tested with WordPress 3.6.1 and works perfectly. To get started, install and activate the plugin, then navigate to its main menu in the admin dashboard.
Once you are in the WP-Optimize menu, check all the options and click the “Process” button. The optimization process may take some time, depending on the size of your database and server. After the optimization is complete, you will receive a detailed report of the values that have been removed from the database.
By using WP-Optimize, you can save a significant amount of space in your database. For example, the plugin may show that you have saved 16.98 MB, which is 53.31% of the total database size.
Other Tips for Optimizing Your Database
In addition to using WP-Optimize, there are a few other tricks you can use to optimize your WordPress database further.
One option is to disable the post revisions feature completely. However, it is not recommended unless you have a specific reason to do so. Disabling post revisions can create more problems than solutions. If you still want to disable it, you can add the following code to your wp-config.php file:
define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, FALSE);
Another way to deal with bulky databases is to automatically empty the trash at regular intervals. You can add the following code to your wp-config.php file to automatically purge all trashed items every 10 days:
define(‘EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS’, 10);
You can adjust the number of days according to your preference, but it must be greater than 0.
Conclusion
Optimizing your WordPress database is crucial for maintaining a fast and efficient website. By removing garbage data and optimizing the database, you can improve the performance of your website for both visitors and content creators. WP-Optimize is an excellent plugin that can help you achieve this with just a few clicks. Additionally, disabling post revisions and automatically emptying the trash can further optimize your database. Take the time to optimize your WordPress database regularly, and you will notice a significant improvement in your website’s speed and performance.
