Have you ever installed WordPress plugins and after use of it uninstalled it? I have done this several times for my blog.
Your blog might be getting thousands of spam comments. You must have edited your older post to make it updated.
Whatever you do with your WordPress blog, all will be backed up to your database. If you are using any WordPress backup plugin then because of these redundant file stored in the database, your backup process will get slow, also space will increase.
Some of you might be faced an issue like your site is slow, not performing well as expected. If you are not cleaning up your database, then you are making a terrible mistake. It means you are still storing the spam comments, revision history, unnecessary files to your database, which will make your blog slower.
When I heard about WordPress database cleanUP then immediately I searched for database cleanup plugins and came up with WP sweep and WP optimize.
When I have cleaned up my database using WP sweep plugin, then my blog performance improved significantly. Now I am cleaning up my database once in a week.
Here I am going to tell you about how you can clean up the WordPress database by using WP Sweep and WP Optimize plugin
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CleanUP database using WP sweep
Before doing anything with WP Sweep plugin, I would recommend you to take a backup of your database.
First, install the WP sweep plugin from the WordPress plugin directory and activate it. To open the WP sweep dashboard click on the Tools >> Sweep.
You will see the different sections to clean up the database. This section organized according to the data stored in the table. Different category are
- Post sweep
- Comment sweep
- User sweep
- Term sweep
- Option sweep
- Database sweep
All the name section name refer to the cleaning area of the database. To cleanUP, the database clicks on the sweep button in front of each section. If you won’t see the sweep button, it means no unnecessary files are present in that table.
Note: Before cleaning any tables backup your database(Use updraft plugin)
This plugin offers you the single button to sweep all your database tables or else you can clean one by one. Along with the sweep button, you will see the Details button, and I recommend you to check the details before cleaning any database table.
In the post sweep detail section, you can see the revision history of this post. This history also stores in the database, which will not be useful anymore. Once you click the sweep button, all your history will be deleted.
WP Sweep plugin will clean
- Revisions
- Auto Draft
- Comments (Spammed, Deleted, Unapproved)
- Duplicate Post/Comment/User Meta
- Any unused terms
All are the above category will be cleaned by using WP sweep plugin.
If you have a WordPress blog, then I highly recommend you to cleanUP your database once in a week/month as per your schedule. It might improve your blog performance.
The similar WordPress plugin does this database cleaning work WP-optimize
CleanUP database using WP Optimize
Both plugins WP sweep vs WP-Optimize have the same functionality, but the method of cleaning database is different. Here at Scrollbucks, I am using WP sweep plugin. I like this plugin because its very simple to use it, and I have experienced the performance of this plugin. WP sweep plugin works well on my blog.
Here, In short, I will tell you how you can use the WP-Optimize plugin to clean up the WordPress database. Once you install the WP-optimize plugin go to the dashboard(click on the WP-optimize)
Similar to WP sweep, this plugin offers you a single button to clean your database.
Click on the Run optimization button to clean the different section database. You can clean all the section at once by clicking the Run all selected optimizations now.
I have used both the plugins for my blog, and after one year experience, I will recommend you to use the WP sweep plugin to clean your WordPress database. Hope that this article helped you to understand the Database cleanup process and how to clean the content of the redundant table.
I have written one more post about the very very important plugin SEO by Yoast, do read it and install it.
Amit Kharbade
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Thanks for details comparison between two optimization plugins, will go with WP Sweep. Cheers.
I was hoping for a more detailed comparison. This blog is one-sided toward WP Sweep. Which I know WP Sweep does help. I have found WP-Optimize is great at deleting old database files that are no longer used and reduces database size. i.e., deleted plugin database files.
Hi Lance,
Thank you for reading the article, I will try to update the article with the latest information. The article was written long ago and we haven’t updated it. Thanks for pointing it out.
Thanks,
Amit