Optimize Your WordPress Website Database With These Best Practices

A WordPress website can be slow for many different reasons; a shoddy database being one of them. Hence, it is important to have a WordPress maintenance workflow that allows you to optimize the WordPress database. It helps in getting rid of the unnecessary data. Not just this, it also helps to locate all the errors and inconsistencies in the database and fix them as well.

Many think that one needs to have programming knowledge in order to optimize the WordPress database which is unlikely the case. In this post, we will talk about how you can optimize your WordPress database effectively. 

• Start With a Backup

Before proceeding with the optimization part, it is a good practice to create a backup of your database. This is just to make sure that if anything goes wrong in the optimization process, you won’t lose any data. There are different ways to back up a WordPress site. 

1. You can create a full back up of your WordPress site from the cPanel of your hosting account. 
2. Export all your content, posts, comments, pages, and other posts using the Tools>Export menu in the admin panel. 
3. A backup plugin can also be used to create a backup of your WordPress site.

• Delete the Content You Don’t Need

In the process of database optimization, it is important to remove all the data that you don’t need. Since each post, comment, page, and post revision get entered in the database, it is important to free up space by removing unused, duplicate, or obsolete content from your WordPress admin area.

• Remove Themes And Plugins You Don’t Use

Themes and plugins of WordPress don’t save in the database rather they get saved in wp-content. But removing the unused ones is still a good idea. Inside the data system, complicated themes and many plugins create extra tables. However, all the plugins and themes adhering WordPress’ coding standards follow the clean process themselves once you remove them from your website. This makes your work a little easier as you just have to remove them from the admin area. 

• Optimize Tables in phpMyAdmin 

phpMyAdmin is an application that gives you access to your raw database. From the cPanel of your hosting account, you can get access to this application. In this step, you will have to optimize the table by opening the database. In your WordPress website’s database system, you will have to select the table you want to optimize. You can also select the ‘Check All’ option. You can also optimize the table by click on the ‘Table Maintenance Group’ and from there can choose the optimize table option to run the query.

• Run WordPress Database Optimization Tools 

In WordPress Core, there is a pre-installed or built-in database optimization tool. However, it remains turned off by default. Hence, you have to activate it in order to use it. This optimization tool can be turned on by making an edit in your wp-config.php file. Now, this wp-config file can be found in the WordPress’ root directory. Open it in the code editor and rest you will have to choose the options accordingly. 

• Use a Database Cleanup Plugin

This is just for the case when you don’t want or can’t get access to the raw database and wp-config file, you can bring plugin into use. This method is also used to perform advanced database optimization tasks by the providers of professional WordPress development services. Here are some highly-recommended plugins that you can use to optimize your database. 

1. Advanced Database Cleaner - it comes with numerous advanced options and allows you to get rid of obsolete, unused, and duplicate content types, like that of, drafts, trash comments, spam, posts, pages, and more. 
2. WP-Optimize: this is a free plugging that allows you to work on all types of optimization including WordPress MySQL optimization. It not just optimize your database, but also cache content and compress images on your website. However, this plugin is highly-preferred and best used for WordPress MySQL optimization. 
3. Optimize Database Ater Deleting Revisions: it is yet another popular plugin that allows you to optimize your database with just one click. The best thing about this tool is that it doesn’t require much configuration. 

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Database optimization is indeed an essential and regular task that has to be done to keep your WordPress website smooth, effective, and appealing. You can also seek professional help for your Wordpress website maintenance that includes database optimization. For that, you can connect with Auxesis Infotech. Being a highly noted WordPress development company, they offer solutions to their clients keeping their business vision into consideration.