Why is your WordPress database essential?
Your WordPress database houses all of your website content: themes, pages, comments, drafts, and posts. It is therefore an irreplaceable part of your company’s online presence. This is why it is so important to maintain your database properly to avoid any future problems. But this data is not only your current information, your database also stores all your past revisions that you have deleted.
IMPORTANT: it is essential to make a backup of your WordPress site before cleaning your database. You can use the UpdraftPlus plugin for this (our detailed article here ) or the WPvivid plugin (our detailed article here ).
The benefits of cleaning your WordPress database
Although it is an essential part, most website owners do not clean their database. It runs silently in the background, so no one thinks to check that it is working efficiently.
However, your WordPress database should only contain a few revisions of your website, it should not be cluttered with all kinds of unnecessary files due to changes accumulated over several years. And if your WordPress database contains too much data, it can slow down your website speed. There are therefore two major advantages to optimizing databases:
1. You save space
Web hosts give you limited space to create and manage your website. After getting rid of all the junk data, you will have more room to build the website you want without worrying about whether you will have enough space.
2. You optimize the performance of your website
Every action on your site is stored in your database. As more and more data is stored, your database will take longer to process the information. Cleaning your data will thus decrease the loading time of the pages of your website.
1/ Meow Apps Database Cleaner Plugin
This very recent plugin was developed by Meow Apps, a company that offers several other specialized and very useful plugins, such as a media file cleaner, or a plugin allowing you to automatically share your publications on social networks.
A user-friendly user interface will help you clean up your WordPress database, regardless of its size. The installation is done like any other plugin: from the “plugins” tab of the WordPress panel, from the page of the wordpress.org site or from the publisher’s website.
Database Cleaner features
What characterizes this plugin is the precision of the options offered and the attention to detail, it is possible to perform each specific action separately, but the editor also has an “automatic cleaning” option for all those who wish a simpler and faster solution. In the event that there are a large number of files to be deleted, the plugin can use asynchronous requests in order to avoid excessively long waiting times which could disrupt the operation of the website.
Regarding your publications, you can easily clean up the various revisions of your publications, drafts, trash, unnecessary comments, unnecessary users, and transients. The plugin also gives you the possibility to optimize your data tables, choosing each of them separately.
This plugin is free, and the Premium version offers some additional options.
2/ The WP-Optimize plugin
WP-Optimize is an all-in-one solution to help you clean up your database, compress your images, and cache your web pages. You can check out our detailed article here .
In order to optimize the WordPress database, WP-Optimize automatically detects and deletes all unnecessary data such as spam comments, old post revisions, Pingbacks and Trackbacks. This process helps you reclaim wasted space on your database and improves your site’s performance.
But all your old data will not be erased: the plugin keeps recent copies of your data. You can set how long you want to keep your posts. After each optimization, you get a report showing your database statistics as well as the space you saved.
The plugin also gives you the option to optimize your data tables and you can select the specific optimizations you want to perform on your database.
Another great feature is the ability to schedule cleanings, which leaves you with one less task to remember and perform manually. You can schedule daily, weekly, or monthly cleanings, and run additional cleanings whenever you need them.
Most features are available in the free version, including database cleaning. The Premium version offers multi-site management and cleaning planning, allowing administrators to perform optimizations at any time of the day, weekday or fortnight, or even on a particular date every month. The Premium version also allows the deletion of unused images in the media library of your WordPress site.
3/ The WP Rocket Plugin
WP Rocket is a WordPress caching plugin that improves the speed of WordPress sites by implementing various advanced optimizations, such as caching, preloading your website’s cache and fonts, minifying CSS and Javascript files, the deferred loading of Javascript files … as well as the optimization of the WordPress database. You can check out our detailed article here .
WP Rocket, unlike many caching plugins, does not require complicated settings and starts working as soon as you install and activate it. This plugin does not require any technical or coding knowledge, but it does allow you to make advanced settings if you wish. Finally, this plugin allows you to easily undo the changes made if you need to.
WP Rocket also offers advanced database optimization so you don’t need to use a separate plugin for this, which is always a good thing when it comes to security and performance. In this section you can enable the following settings:
- The Post Cleanup feature allows us to permanently remove post revisions, auto drafts, and deleted posts, which is especially great for blogs.
- Comment Cleanup helps to permanently remove spam and deleted comments.
- Transient Cleanup: This feature is really useful, as transients can really slow down a website.
- Database cleaning.
- Finally, you can configure an automatic cleaning, this cleaning can be daily, weekly, or monthly.
WP Rocket is compatible with Apache, NGINX, Microsoft IIS, and LiteSpeed.
We have the choice between 3 annual plans, depending on the number of websites we want to optimize:
The Single plan is valid for a single WordPress site and costs only $49 per year (or €44 per year), support included. You can use the plugin on more websites by upgrading your license. When you upgrade, you will only pay the price difference between your current license and the one you are upgrading to.
The Plus plan allows you to optimize 3 websites and costs $99 per year (or €88 per year). Finally, the Infinite plan costs $249 per year (or €222 per year) and allows the optimization of an unlimited number of WordPress sites.
Sometimes you can get the plugin at a discounted price. A 100% money back guarantee is offered within 14 days of purchase. When renewing the license, a 30% discount is offered.
In conclusion, WP-Optimize and WP Rocket both offer many very useful, even essential features. But if your website is already optimized and you only want to clean and optimize your WordPress database, you can choose the “Database Cleaner” plugin from Meow Apps.
