When you’ve been running a WordPress site for a while you’ll quickly find that the size of your database will slowly grow over time, in addition to it becoming cluttered with old database tables from deleted plugins and post revisions you don’t need and more.
Because the database can become cluttered and inefficient, it’s important to make sure that every once in a while you do a little bit of database cleanup. You want everything to be running in tip top shape, right?
WordPress Database Optimization And Cleanup Plug-ins
Here are a few database optimization and management plugins that I’ve used over the last couple years to help make these maintenance tasks easier.
- WP-DBManager – See all your tables, optimize, repair, perform backups, and more. Great tool for your database.
- WP-phpMyAdmin – Access phpMyAdmin from your dashboard. If you aren’t skilled with more advanced SQL code, skip this one.
- Plugins Garbage Collector – Helps you identify database tables you are no longer using, or that were made by plugins that have since been deactivated or deleted. It identifies all DB tables that aren’t part of the core WP files, then uses a color code to let you know if the table belongs to an active, disabled, or deleted plugin. You should be able to find a few DB tables you can safely drop the data from, or flat out delete.
- Delete Revision – By default WordPress saves revisions of your posts, so in the end you could end up having multiple revisions of the same post. This plugin will allow you to delete un-needed revisions of your posts to clear up database space. I just ran it on one of my sites and freed up an entire 1 mb of space. Only problem is the plugin author uses broken english, so be careful.
- Optimize Database – Over time your database becomes cluttered, and it needs to be optimized. Think of it like defragging your hard drive. This plugin defrags your database.
- Broken Link Checker – While this isn’t completely related to the database and optimization, finding broken links and removing or updating them could be considered a cleanup activity.
Some of the tools above will perform the same or similar tasks, so find out which ones you like best, and use them for your WordPress database maintenance tool.
What tools do you use to maintain your WordPress database? Tell us in the comments!
This is something I need to work on. Who know how cluttered my db is after three+ years of blogging?!?
Probably got at least a bit of stuff in there. I checked my 3 year old database and was able to remove a bunch of old rows for deleted plugins, and drop a bunch of size by optimizing.