How to Clean Up Your WordPress Database for Improved Performance
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How to Clean Up Your WordPress Database for Improved Performance
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WordPress is a great content management system and offers a ton of features and flexibility. However, all that extra data storage and processing can take a toll on your website’s performance. A slow WordPress site can frustrate your visitors and hurt your business.
Fortunately, there are a few simple things you can do to clean up your WordPress database and improve performance. In this article, we’ll show you how to clean up your WordPress database for improved performance.
Why Does Your WordPress Database Get Clogged Up?
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of how to clean up your WordPress database, let’s briefly discuss why it gets clogged up in the first place.
Each time you or someone else accesses your WordPress site, the database has to process a lot of data. For example, when you load a page, the database has to:
Fetch the post content from the database
Fetch the comments for that post
Fetch the user information for each comment
This data processing can slow down your website, especially if your WordPress database is not optimized. Additionally, as your website grows, so does the amount of data that your database has to process. This can further slow down your website.
How to Clean Up Your WordPress Database
Now that we’ve covered why your WordPress database might need a clean up, let’s look at how to do it.
1. Delete Unnecessary Data
One of the first things you can do to clean up your WordPress database is to delete unnecessary data. This includes things like:
Spam comments
Trash posts
Revisions of posts
Unused tags
Unused categories
2. Optimize Your Database Tables
Your WordPress database is made up of Tables. Over time, these Tables can become fragmented. This means that the data is not stored as efficiently as it could be.
Fortunately, you can optimize your WordPress database Tables to defragment them and improve performance.
3. Reduce Post Revisions
By default, WordPress saves a revision of your posts every time you hit the “Save Draft” or “Update” button. While this can be useful, it also bloat’s your database with a lot of extra data.
If you don’t need post revisions, you can disable them by adding this line of code to your wp-config.php file:
define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false );
4. Delete Orphaned Data
When you delete a post, page, or comment in WordPress, it doesn’t necessarily delete all the data associated with it. This is called “orphaned data” and it can add extra bloat to your WordPress database.
Orphaned data can be cleaned up with a WordPress plugin like WP-Sweep. This plugin will delete orphaned postmeta, comments, terms, and other data.
5. Disable Hotlinking and Leeching of Your Content
Hotlinking is when someone includes an image from your website in their own post or page. Leeching is when someone copies your entire article and includes it on their own website.
Both hotlinking and leeching can add extra strain to your server and slow down your website. The best way to combat hotlinking and leeching is to add some code to your .htaccess file.
Conclusion
We hope this article helped you learn how to clean