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It’s time to clean up your WordPress database.

WordPress logo and broom

When’s the last time you cleaned up your WordPress blog’s database? Over time, things build up that you don’t see, but can cause performance issues. The good news is that it’s easy to clean up.

I use the Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions plugin and it works beautifully. Granted, always make a backup first just in case things don’t go as planned.

When I cleaned up this site, I removed any post revisions older than 90 days and only kept up to 10 revisions per post. When ran, it deleted 4128 revisions! That’s a lot of data.

It also cleaned up 797 expired transients and 1339 orphaned postmeta. All of this is stuff you don’t need. I also optimized the database.

After doing all these things, my database dropped in size by nearly half. I cut out 36 MB of data. That’s unbelievable!

All of this cleanup, and yet nothing on my site changed. No posts were removed, nothing negatively affected. If anything, it’s better. Smaller is better and runs faster.

On a go forward, I’ve setup the plugin to automatically run the cleanup every week so that things don’t get that bad again.

If you have a WordPress site, I highly recommend cleaning things up at least once a year if not more often. Things build up that you may not see, but it will slow down your site.


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