Your WordPress site is getting slower and slower as you have too many posts or are running lots of plugins.
You may already know that Page Speed is confirmed as a critical ranking factor in today’s search engine optimization especially for mobile searches:
Today we’re announcing that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches. – Google Webmaster Central Blog
Database performance is one of the most important factors that affect page speed.
The old school way to optimize your WordPress database:
- Login to your web hosting control panel (for example cPanel).
- Login to the phpMyAdmin.
- Find and select the database you want to optimize.
- Select all tables by Clicking
Check All. - In the dropdown list, choose
Optimize table.
Too complicated, isn’t it?
To speed up your WordPress sites with no PHP and Mysql skills, the fastest and easiest way is to use a Database optimization plugin.
Database optimization and manipulation are absolutely crucial to managing data on a WordPress website. In order to appropriately manage data and improve speeds on a WordPress site, it’s important to have these tools in place, especially when performing bulk edits on posts, pages, and more.
With a few database cleaners available for optimizing your WordPress, it is important to pick the plugin that offers the least amount of hassles in optimizing a database.
If you don’t have a budget for premium WordPress plugins, there are also a large number of excellent and totally free WordPress Database Optimization Plugins on the web.
Here are the top 6 up-to-date and fully free Database Optimization Plugins from which you can choose to clean up and optimize the database and speed up your WordPress site. Enjoy.
Originally Published Mar 19 2018, updated Feb 21 2023
1. WP-Optimize
Total downloads: 1,000,000+
Five Star Ratings: 2,000+
WP-Optimize is an effective tool for automatically cleaning your WordPress database so that it runs at maximum efficiency.
Features:
- Removes all unnecessary data (e.g. trashed/unapproved/spam comments, stale data) plus pingbacks, trackbacks and expired transient options
- Compact/de-fragment MySQL tables with a button-press
- Detailed control of which optimizations you wish to carry out
- Carries out automatic weekly (or otherwise) clean-ups
- Retains a set number of weeks’ data during clean-ups
- Performs optimizations without the need for running manual queries
- Automatically trigger a pre-optimize backup via UpdraftPlus (https://updraftplus.com)
- Show database statistics and potential savings
- Mobile friendly and easy-to-use
- Translated into several languages
2. Advanced Database Cleaner
Total downloads: 100,000+
Five Star Ratings: 1,100+
This plugin was created by Younes JFR and it performs a number of automatic checks to complete a full-on database cleanup. You might be surprised to know that your database is filled up with a series of old drafts, spam comments that haven’t been deleted and more.
This cleaner can work to regularly clear out almost every aspect of these bulk files which are not benefiting your website in any way. This is one of the most advanced database cleaners available on the WordPress network and it performs a variety of functions that would regularly take hours for a user.
Features:
- Delete old revisions of posts and pages
- Delete old drafts of posts and pages
- Delete old auto drafts
- Delete pending comments
- Delete spam comments
- Delete trash comments
- Delete orphan postmeta
- Delete orphan commentmeta
- Delete orphan relationships
- Delete orphan dashboard transient feeds
- You can choose what items to clean-up
- You can schedule your database clean up to run automatically
- Optimize database and improve website speed
- You can schedule your database optimization to run automatically
- View and clean cron tasks (scheduled tasks)
- View and clean tables
- View and clean options
- Supports multisite installation
3. Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
Total downloads: 100,000+
Five Star Ratings: 170+
A popular ‘one-click’ plugin to clean and optimize your WordPress database.
Features:
- Deletes revisions of posts, pages and / or custom post types (you optionally can keep an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions and you can choose to delete revisions older than…)
- Deletes trashed posts, pages and comments (optional)
- Deletes spammed comments (optional)
- Deletes unused tags (optional)
- Deletes ‘expired or all transients’ (optional)
- Deletes ‘pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’ (optional)
- Deletes ‘orphan postmeta items’
- Optimizes the database tables (optionally you can exclude certain tables, or even specific posts/pages, from optimization)
- Creates a log file of the optimizations (optional)
- Optimization can be scheduled to automatically run once hourly, twice daily, once daily or once weekly at a specific time (optional)
- ‘Optimize DB (1 click)’ link in the admin bar (optional)
- ‘Optimize Database’ Icon in the admin menu (optional)
- MULTISITE compatible: optimizes all sites in the network with one click
4. WP-Sweep
Total downloads: 100,000+
Five Star Ratings: 110+
A WordPress plugin focused on clean up your WordPress site by removing useless data such as Revisions, Auto drafts, Deleted comments, Unapproved comments, Spammed comments, Deleted comments, Orphaned post meta, Orphaned comment meta, Orphaned user meta, Orphaned term meta, Orphan term relationships, Unused terms, Duplicated post meta, Duplicated comment meta, Duplicated user meta, Duplicated term meta, Transient options, Optimizes database tables, oEmbed caches in post meta.
5. WP-DBManager
Total downloads: 90,000+
Five Star Ratings: 90+
This is a multi-purpose WordPress plugin which can be used to back up, optimize and repair the database.
Tthe plugin automatically creates a folder called database backup ensuring all of the most important files are kept in a separate area for recovery. The vast majority of cleanup options from this plugin are minimal at best however. It’s more designed for recovery and management.
6. Media Cleaner: Clean your WordPress
Total downloads: 60,000+
Five Star Ratings: 500+
Media Cleaner is a powerful plugin that helps you clean up your WordPress media library by deleting unused media entries and files, as well as fixing broken entries. With an internal trash feature, you can preview and confirm changes before permanently deleting anything. Plus, Media Cleaner uses smart analysis to ensure compatibility with specific plugins and themes.
This plugin is compatible with all media types, including retina and WebP versions. It has been tested on a wide range of WordPress versions, including the latest version with Gutenberg, as well as on various themes with a large community of users. It also supports WooCommerce. For users with more complex plugins for handling website content, the Pro version may be necessary for optimal compatibility. We are constantly working to increase compatibility with other plugins.
Conclusion:
Ultimately, database optimization is a complicated process. Any plugin can only really do so much, and that is why it’s important to take other steps to keep your database running as smoothly as possible. For experienced WordPress users, this may not be ideal because it involves too many manual steps. But for beginners and those less familiar with PHP My Admin’s extra features, this plugin makes an excellent introduction to the world of performance optimization.
To optimize your site with WordPress plugins, read our Best WordPress SEO Plugins and visit the SEO section for more information.
