WordPress is known to be the most popular CMS around the world, but this powerful beast is only able to work when it has a database. The backbone of WordPress is the database, and without it, you may be having no WordPress or there might be a database error. Therefore, if you want to keep your WordPress site running, then it is essential that you do maintain WordPress Clean Database.
Keeping your WordPress clean database is among a number of ways of making sure that your WordPress site is able to maintain its integrity. A clean and optimized database keeps your storage space lower, reduces any errors, and this way, it offers you a very fast and efficient experience as a user. This is the main reason why your WordPress database cleanup is necessary on a regular basis.
It is a known fact that website speed has become a top concern for the majority of web owners and developers. If you are looking for a complete caching system for your WordPress site, you will find PageSpeedy.io a viable solution that helps you integrate various caching tools in a single place easily. Other than that, PageSpeedy does a great job by doing everything itself without requiring any extra plugins, and it also has a nice CDN for an additional speedup in loading the resources.
Why WordPress database cleanup is important?
As being a Content Management System or CMS, WordPress is able to store all the data in its database. Therefore, to avoid maintaining various copies of your website’s content, everything you publish is saved by WordPress in exactly the same place where your website database lies. Although it can be quite convenient for updating the posts or pages over time, on the other hand, it also gets necessary to clean up the old entries.
When you have a clean WordPress database, you will notice that it is helping the search engines to find your blog articles as well as the users when your site is browsed by them. When the database gets cluttered by the outdated information from the abandoned product reviews or the spam comments, then there are chances that your website will get slow.
For the individuals crawling the search engine, a clean server is always good because it looks through the content of the web page in order to find out what it is about. It further examines whether or not this particular content should be added to the directory.
When there is a cluttered WordPress blog post that has a number of spam comments, then it will surely become hard or impossible for the bots to parse. Therefore, when these entries are removed from the database, it gets helpful for you to make sure that Google is aware something interesting is happening.
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How to do WordPress database cleanup?
There are several techniques that can be used to clean up a WordPress database, as the database is the home of your website, and you have to keep it safe and tidy. Your WordPress database is something that you should not mess with, and therefore, the following steps can be taken to keep it clean.
WordPress Database Backup
The main idea is WordPress cleanup because a database is everything that your WordPress site is running on. The database gets cleaned up with the help of the database maintenance tools, but before the installation of such a tool and starting the cleaning process, the first step is to back up your WordPress database.
Backing up the database is the most important thing one needs to do before cleaning the WordPress data. While operating beside your PC, you ought to be certain that you are alert for any shocks. One of the biggest surprises that you may face is losing the entire database. If such a situation happens, then you will need to start a new one.
Backup is important in order to avoid any surprises because sometimes even a small mistake can cost you the entire database. When this happens, you will automatically lose your website and all of the work that you have been doing on it. Therefore, backing up your database is always advisable before you start the maintenance work.
The most positive aspect of backup is that you can restore your WordPress site anytime if something happens sideways. It is worth noting that your WordPress database is just like the soul of your website, and if you happen to lose it by any mistake, it will obviously be very costly for you.
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WordPress Database Cleanup: Unused Plugins
The plugin has its own importance when it is about maintaining a website, but it can also be a big reason behind a mess. If you have any unused plugins on your website, there are chances that these plugins might be responsible for causing a lot of issues, and this can surely make your website slow as well as lagging behind.
When you don’t use the plugins at all, they can still have an effect on your website. The main reason is that the system browsers tend to follow before loading a page. There is a different line of codes with each plugin, so when the web page browser is opened, it calls all of the plugins in order to load it completely.
As the web developers are busy with their works, there are chances that they may forget to delete the unused plugins from the database, and this may result in a bloating website. WordPress clean database old plugins is another important thing that should be done.
You have to look for the old or unused plugins and then delete them. There is a possibility that you may have installed the plugins in order to test them or the ones that used to serve the same purpose. It doesn’t matter what the reason is, but it will be great if you delete the unused plugins from your system.
WordPress Database Cleanup: Delete any Plugin Data
For a WordPress cleanup database, deleting only the plugins may not be enough. You will also be required to delete the unused plugins from the database, but even after deletion, some of the plugins will leave the data into your system. This data can take up unnecessary space in the design, and with the passage of time, you may not be left with enough room for the things that are actually needed by your website.
By deleting the unused data from the WordPress clean database, you have to search where this data is stored on your website. This data can be found in the table; therefore, deleting the entire unused data will obviously make your website run smoother and much faster. Thus Speeding up the website.
There is a policy by the database providers that can be helpful for you in WordPress to delete plugin data from the database in order to keep your WordPress database clean. You can request them and inquire them for guidance when you desire.
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Spam Comments must be deleted
Nowadays, it is the spam comments that everybody looks for, whether it be a website or a social media account whether it’s Facebook or Twitter. You have to be careful everywhere and keep an alert of these spam comments. You can easily find a WordPress database cleaner that helps you to make sure that you will not get any spam comments, but if you are still getting them, then it’s time for you to clean up.
There are a number of people who enjoy spamming the work of others, and although it is bizarre happiness that spamming others give them, they still like to do it. Therefore, it gets important for us to protect our website from them. It is worth noting that the spam comments can either be promotional or hate comments.
A few queries can be quite helpful for you to get rid of spam comments. Sometimes you may have to replace the # with the site ID in order to clean the spam comments. After doing this simple task, you will notice that you have got rid of the spam comments.
Database table
Optimizing your database table is another important task to do, and you will not be required to install a plugin for this purpose. This can be accomplished quite effortlessly with just a few actions. All you ought to do is to continue to phpMyAdmin and later snap on the database. Then, by scrolling at the bottom of the page, you have to click the Check All box and then go for the optimize table option.
If there are multiple tables present on your website, then you would have to repeat the entire process. In case your website is a larger one, then this process may take a much longer time. When all of the database tables are optimized, then, in the end, you will be receiving a completion message.
Clear comments that await moderation
When you clean the spam comments, it also gets important for you to moderate some of the comments after some time. You have to keep in mind to observe the website comments, and if the majority of your comments are spam and you don’t have much time to clean all of these, then a simple query can be helpful for you to delete them.
This particular query can also be helpful for you to clean any comments that are waiting to be moderate. It is worth noting that these comments might be responsible for causing a lot of stress, but before you go with the process, it is important that you check out the comments in order to sort out the genuine ones.
Take care of any unused tags
This must have happened to almost all of the users that when the blog, they start to create hundreds of tags keeping in mind that they will be using them whenever required. Nowadays, people have started to post on a regular basis, and therefore, they hardly change any of the tags, and that is why they go for the common titles and then stick to those.
It is not a surprise to completely forget the hundreds of tags that may be existing on the website database. But fortunately, now there is a query that is able to take care of all of the tags, but before you run the query, it is important that you check those tags that you are still using.
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Different plugins that can clean your database
There are various free as well as premium plugins out there in the market that you can find very helpful for a WordPress clean database with minimal effort. When you have to test a lot of different available options, you will discover WP-Optimize, WP-Sweep, and WP Rocket to be the best in terms of optimizing your database and ease of use.
- WP-Optimize
You will find WP-Optimize to be the most popular of the WordPress database optimization plugins. It has more than 600,000 installs from all over the world and is very easy to use. The ‘Table Information’ tab of the WP-Optimize displays the tables as well as their size in the database.
You have the option of scheduling your database optimization so that it can run whenever you want it in an automatic way, and it even makes all of the changes for you. WP-Optimize is quite a simple plugin to use, but it is necessary to back up the site before you start using it.
- WP-Sweep
WP-Sweep has also started to gain a good following, as it was developed by Lester Chan, a well-known WordPress developer. You will find the plugin to have an intuitive interface displaying a report regarding any unnecessary data in your database. This plugin is further divided into comments, posts, options, terms, as well as optimizing tables.
When you click on ‘Sweep,’ the plugin starts to optimize your database for the particular entry. In addition to this, you also have the alternative to sweeping all of your databases. WP-Sweep is somewhat different, as it uses the WordPress delete functions for cleaning the database instead of deleting the MySQL queries.
- WP Rocket
Many people are not aware of the fact that WP Rocket also includes database optimization. In order to access this particular feature, you need to click ‘Database’ in the settings. Its interface is very intuitive, and within no time, you will be able to see the number of tables that are available for optimization.
WP Rocket has five different sections, which include comments, posts, database cleanup, and transients that are helping to clean up the trash posts, revisions, and much more. With WP Rocket, you can also schedule an automatic WordPress clean database that can be set to run on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that database maintenance can be difficult, but things can get easier when you have the right tools. WordPress clean database can improve the performance of your site in a great manner, and therefore, it is recommended to make cleanup and optimizing your database a habit. Anything that is done to give an edge to your site can be beneficial, but it is up to you to decide whether you go for the manual methods like deleting the cookies, posts, spam comments, etc., or you clean it up by using any plugin.
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