WordPress Database Optimization Tips [A Guide]

WordPress Database Optimization Tips [A Guide]. Have you ever optimized your WordPress website database? Optimizing your site database cleans up all undesirable data which reduces database size and increases performance.

The WordPress database stores all of your website’s important information. This included pages, comments, blog posts, custom post links, portfolio items, and form entries. However, without proper maintenance, this database storage center can become swollen and start decreasing site load speed. Therefore, Optimizing the WordPress database is vital to enhance your site’s performance.

Fortunately, there are various techniques you can use to optimize your WordPress database. For clearing the database, you can do it manually and clear unneeded and outdated information or you can install a WordPress database optimization plugin such as WP-Optimize.

In this post blog, we will present top tips for optimizing your database and increasing your site performance. Let’s start!

Why You Should Optimize Your WordPress Database?

If you’ve been using the WordPress platform for a while, there might be a lot of valueless data reserved in your databases such as spam comments, transient options, trash, post revisions, orphaned metadata, and many more.

Reducing unwanted data increase your website performance and database size, which means your WordPress backups will take more space and time to restore all your data.

There are various benefits for cleaning up databases such as faster backups, easier restores, and improved website performance.

Top Tips For Optimizing WordPress Database

There are many tips you can find on the internet for Optimizing the WordPress database. In this article, you will find the best-proven tips you can apply on your website such as, using a WordPress database optimization plugin, manually optimizing database tables, taking out the trash, and a lot more.

Use a WordPress database optimization plugin

Using a WordPress database optimization plugin can significantly reduce your workload. Instead of searching manually through your files with phpMyAdmin, you can put your confidence in this plugin. As such, this technique is one of the best choices if you are a newbie.

WP-Optimize plugin is one of the best choices for optimizing for WordPress databases. This tool is an all-in-one solution that you can utilize for compressing your images, caching clearing, and optimizing your website database.

WP-Optimize clears your WordPress database in various ways, including:

Deleting unnecessary data
Compacting and defragmenting database tables
Cleaning out the database on a scheduled or automated basis
Creating pre-optimization data backups
Displaying statistics about database cleanups

Get Faster WordPress Hosting

Moving to a faster host can often fix multiple issues. Regardless of the amount you optimize your site, if you have slow hosting, your WordPress site will run slow until you redesign. Do your research and you’ll see SiteGround is definitely favored in the WordPress community.

Reduce Image Size

Images are the significant contributors to page load speeds on some random site page. Images carry life to your content and help boost commitment. Try to reduce the size of the images without compromising on the quality. Fortunately, there are plugins available for just about everything including image optimization, one worth focusing on is WP Smush, EWWW Image Optimizer(opens in a new tab)(opens in another tab).

Minify JS and CSS Files

Decreasing the quantity of CSS and JS calls as well as the size of those files, you can further develop the site loading speed. Minification of resources means eliminating unnecessary characters from your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS that are not needed to load

This speeds up your load times as it reduces how much code that has to be requested from the server.

Optimize Homepage to Load Quickly

This isn’t one thing however really a few easy things that you can do to ensure that your homepage loads quickly, which probably is the most significant piece of your site because people will land there the most often.

Things that you can include:

Show excerpts instead of full posts
Reduce the number of posts on the page (We like showing between 5-7)
Eliminate unnecessary sharing widgets from the landing page (include them only in posts)
Eliminate dormant plugins and widgets that you don’t require
Keep it minimal! Readers are hanging around for content, not 8,000 widgets on the homepage.

Lazy Load Images and Videos

Lazy loading is a concept where you delay the loading of an item-unit until it is required. On WordPress, this usually refers to not loading objects until a user scrolls down the page or using an on-click occasion. You can lazy load all sorts of content, from images to videos.

To lazy load images and videos, you might use plugins or techniques that replace all post images, post thumbnails, avatar images, and content iframes. With a placeholder loads the content as it gets closer to entering the browser window when a visitor scrolls the page, replacing inserted YouTube and Vimeo videos with a clickable preview image.

Use a Faster WordPress Theme

If your WordPress topic comes with tons of built-in features (shortcodes, styling, subject options…) you might consider relocating to a topic that is the faster topic, that loads quicker.

Disable Hotlinking

Hotlinking refers to someone directly linking to one of your images on their own server. This means when someone visits their site it has to load the image from your server, taking up your bandwidth. You can disable hotlinking by adding the following code to your .htaccess file and refreshing it with your area name.

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC]

RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]

Install a WordPress Caching Plugin

WordPress’ pages are “dynamic.” This means they’re built on the fly each time someone visits a post or page on your website. To build your pages, WordPress has to run a process to find the necessary information, set up everything, and then, at that point, display it to your user. This process involves a lot of steps, and it can really slow down your website.

It’s best to use a WordPress plugin. Reserving can make your WordPress site somewhere in the range of 2x to 5x faster. Storing plugins makes a duplicate of the page after the first load, and serves that cached version to each subsequent user. Some of the best plugins are WP Fastest Cache(opens in a new tab)(opens in another tab), WP Super Cache(opens in a new tab)(opens in another tab).

Disable Pingbacks and Trackbacks

Pingbacks and trackbacks are considered by some as a legacy feature now, and they can cause slowness regarding page speed. With Ahrefs, Google alerts, and other brand monitoring tools now available, there are vastly improved ways to see if someone has linked to your content.

You can disable pingbacks and trackbacks under the discussion settings on WordPress.