Tweaking WordPress and Optimizing Databases

Ever since my migration to the new hosting provider, I’ve had a few problems creating new posts on the blog. I would use PHPmyadmin to repair tables that had overhead, and sometimes that would fix the problem. At other times the webserver would even lose connectivity to the SQL backend completely for about 5 minutes. And this was beginning to happen more and more frequently.

One of the tables that seemed to have chronic overhead issues was the wp-options table. This is the table most often used by plugins and theme templates. I had browsed the table contents and knew that there were quite a few rows that I didn’t need anymore, but was reluctant to drop them without knowing if it would have adverse impact on the site’s functionality.

Then I found this page over at WPMU that recommended three fantastic plugins.

WP-Optimize: This is a database cleanup and optimization tool. It allows you to remove post revisions, comments in the spam queue, un-approved comments within few clicks.

WP Database Optimizer: This plugin allows you to optimize your WordPress tables on a schedule. It uses the WordPress Database Class to do the work, and you can set the number of days in between optimizations.

Clean Options: This plugin finds orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_options table.

The orphaned options cleaner worked fantastic, and it located scores of old useless rows in my options table that were leftover from old themes, plugins, and outdated content collected on the site over the past 5 years. And the database optimizer found all kinds of auto-saved files, spam comments and draft posts that were taking up a lot of DB space. And best of all, I didn’t have to use the kludgy PHPmyadmin to fix these DB errors.