So far you have taken all the primary steps to make your WordPress blog rocket speedy. Your theme is optimized, images and videos are in good shape, CSS/JS compressed and loading fast, finally we enabled browser caching, so your browser is not bothering server for each and every content.
By now you must be experiencing at least 5 times better performance in your WordPress blog. Very importantly, we were trying to do each and every step manually, so you know it in and out. At the same time I gave you the relevant plug-ins to automate it as well.
Today we are trying to optimize MySQL database in your WordPress blog. This is a very important part in WordPress blog. But most of the bloggers have never even seen it. That’s where your blog save all the data including, posts, pages, comments and configuration.
Roadmap
What are The Reasons for Laggy WordPress Database?
WordPress database is carefully engineered for maximum performance following appropriate database design principles. So you don’t have to worry about its structure. But you have to pay attention to data that gets stored in it. More data leads it to lesser performance in operations. So you have to make sure it’s not storing unwanted and irrelevant data.
You might ask “How come irrelevant data go in to my WordPress Database?” actually there are no totally irrelevant data. This is how it happens. When you are writing a post, WordPress engine is saving periodic revisions. So you can go back to previous version if you want to. And you could save your post as drafts and sometimes it’s happening automatically. When you have spam comments and unapproved comments, still they are getting saved in database. All of those add new records to database and you rarely use them. They are just making your database slower and bigger.
How to Remove Unwanted Record from Database?
First I’ll tell you the manual way. Go to hosting control panel and then go to PHP MyAdmin. There you can see your wordpress database. Open it and see the tables there. Before we go to next step make sure you back up database.
Go to wp_posts and see records there. See the posts status and you will find values such as published, draft, auto-draft, inherit and revision. Delete everything except the records with post status published and inherit. And you have to do the same in wp_comments table. You have to remove unapproved comments. However this will require some SQL knowledge and it’s not that common. This could be a risk as well, since you could accidently remove good records.
So here my recommendation is to use a plug-in. The best and simple plug-in I have ever come across with is wp-optimize. Once you install the plugin, it will give you new main menu item. There you can check things you need to clean up including revisions, drafts and spam comments then remove those with one click.
Ok, now your database is also optimized, having lesser records and smaller. If you have taken care of the entire previous aspects, now you are an owner of a high performance WordPress blog.
You can test the speed of your blog using YSlow browser plugin, Google Page Speed online or Pingdom full page test.
However, to complete the picture you have to pay attention to hosting environment and its hardware as well. It’s coming up in next article.
Contact me @MalindaOnline to claim your Free Website Performance Review. I’m giving you a detailed report with identified performance bottlenecks and optimum cost effective solution.
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Tags: #Blog #Database #Performance #SEO