The database accumulates loads of irrelevant data such as spam and trash comments. Moreover, there is a great load of plugin data stored in the database even when a plugin is not in use or is removed.
Cleaning your database saves on storage as well as improve the overall performance of your WordPress website. In this post, you will learn how to easily clean up all the unnecessary data from a WordPress database in a few clicks.
Step 1
The first step is to download the two plugins needed for this tutorial. Before cleaning the database, it is strongly recommended to back-up first. The plugins we need are ‘WP-Sweep’ and ‘WP-DBManager’ for database cleaning and backing-up respectively
1. Install and activate WP-Sweep.
2. Install and activate WP-DBManager.
Step 2
You need to create a current database backup using ‘WP-DBManager’ plugin we just installed. Click on the ‘Backup DB’ option under the database tab at the bottom of the left panel.
After checking the security and backup status of your database, a success message should appear below like in the example below.
Click the ‘Backup’ button below the page to complete the backup process.
The success message will appear on top of the page with a timestamp of your backup.
Click on the ‘Manage Backup DB’ button.
Finally, enter your email to send a copy of your database backup. Alternatively, you can download a copy to your personal computer.
Step 3
Since we have a current backup, we can now clean the WordPress database. We will be using the ‘WP-Sweep’ plugin we installed in Step 1.
Click on the ‘Sweep’ options under the ‘Tools’ tab to open the WP-Sweep plugin configuration page.
Step 4
This is the final step where we clean all unnecessary data from your WordPress database. On the WP-Sweep page, you can choose to sweep each category separately or clean everything at once by pressing the ‘Sweep All’ button.
NOTE: You should not have any draft items when conducting a full sweep.
If you followed all the steps, you have successfully cleaned your WordPress website. It is recommended that you clean your database regularly to save on storage and overall performance upgrade.
