Maintain Quick and Clean WordPress Database for Your Websites

Maintain Quick and Clean WordPress Database for Your Websites

WordPress is in the market for more than a decade and into a position now to be considered as the No.1 CMS for development projects. If you are planning to develop corporate websites, blogs, or professional portfolio sites, WordPress serves as a flexible and feature-rich development platform. It puts forth a large set of developmental tools and thousands of themes and plug-ins to get the job done easily. Similarly, there are tons of plugins to clean WordPress database for good performance.

What makes WordPress a winner among other CMS is its simplicity. It is said that even a person with no technology or developmental skills can set up a blog or website on WordPress by using the tools properly. Management of WordPress websites, hosting, and updating the blogs are also much easier compared to hard-coded websites.

 

Clean WordPress Database

As we know, a solid database is a key for better performance of any websites, so as in WordPress too. It is much easier to administer WordPress database administration. And there are many database-specific plug-INS also available in order to make WordPress website management more effective. Further, in this article, we will try to learn how to maintain a clean and fast WordPress database for your websites.

Maintaining a clean WordPress DB

A quick take:

  • Create backups from time to time
  • Uninstall the WP plug-ins which aren’t needed anymore and all the data
  • Make use of SQL
  • Delete any spam comment
  • Clean all the Zombie Tables
  • Remove the drafts or revised versions as soon as the content is made live

Like any technology out there, everything about WordPress is not so rosy. The users of WordPress have complaints about slowing down of the platform reflecting on page load speed. The database clutter on WordPress portal is due to the accumulation of the junk comments and blog revisions etc. Further, we will discuss the WordPress database cleaning tips for the users to practice.

Using WordPress plug-ins

You can use any good plug-in to clean the WordPress database. With this approach, you need not have to worry about the technicalities of the database cleaning process as it can do everything for your own installation and running. The steps are:

  • Install a good plug-in like WP-Sweep from the corresponding repository
  • Active it and then go to Tools and choose ‘Sweep.’

You will be taken to the page where the application will show an analysis of the existing dataset. There you can see where the clutter is, with suggestions on what to do for optimizing the DB. You can simply click on the clean button to de-clutter the entire database or select section by section to clean only those which are irrelevant.

Even though the plug-ins is mostly safe to use and effective in terms of database cleaning, sometimes it may also delete something which it may not delete. So, before hitting the delete button, make sure that you made a proper backup of the DB in order not lose any valuable data.

Different ways to clean WordPress database

A clean database is important for the smooth operation of your WP websites. Providers like RemoteDBA.com offers comprehensive support for database cleanup, but the major issue is that many of the individual users tend to do is to consider database cleanup as a one-time activity, which is not enough.

The expert recommendation in terms of database cleanup is that it should be made a regularly scheduled activity to be run by the DBAs. In terms of WordPress, you need to ensure that there is a connection established between WordPress and the database. Here are the tips for maintaining a clean database.

Backup properly

It is very risky to work with a database as there are chances that things may go wrong at any point. In all cases, one should maintain a recent version of DB to be replaced in case of any loss. So, the primary requirement for any business is to back up the existing database to local storage or cloud storage whichever is feasible.

Proper dusting off the database

We used to install many themes and plug-ins on to WordPress sites from time to time. But then tend to forget it later. Due to this, junk gets accumulated on to the database as the themes, and plug-ins leave many references to the database files. This will future causing higher loading time to the database information. This makes it mandatory to clean the database from time to time after removal or plugins and themes to get it clutter-free.

Using SQL

Usage of SQL is a unique way to improve the health of your database. The essential thing to do is using phpMyAdmin and then selects databases you need to work with. PhpMyAdmin is an ideal tool to manage the database better and remove any clutter.

Cleaning up the Zombie tables

Themes and plug-ins installed on to the WordPress websites will create many database tables to manage their performance and information. Issues arise when the user add many plugins to the websites. Even when you trail with many themes and ultimately use one, the same kind of table creation happens and you need to clean WordPress database. Resulting from it, the database will form clutter as there is a huge number of tables in it over time, most of which are not in use. You need to ensure that all these unwanted tables are removed from the once the plug-in or theme is uninstalled.

Bust off the spam

In the context of WP development. Any elements which adversely affect the performance of a site can be considered as spam. On WordPress websites. Various types and shapes of spasm will be existing ranging from page content to comments, post, and other invisible elements. As the major chunk of the spam on WP is usually seen in the comment section. You can take the initiative to delete the comment spam and lighten the database. Use the below SQL query for database cleanup.

You can use it to delete the spam and from the dashboard manually. You can schedule it to run at regular intervals to automatically clear the spam.

Business websites are at a higher risk with the cluttered database and to keep a clean WordPress database is important. The best way to deal with this problem is to remove all the revisions. And drafts as soon as the posts are published. Ideally, you must make the revisions and draft removals a weekly activity to keep your database clean and not to tamper the website performance.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.