Do-It-Yourself: How To Optimize WordPress Database Performance

I assume you have already setup your website using the best CMS out there which is WordPress and you posted articles one after another, incoming traffic is good, your website is running quite fast and everything seems running pretty well until one day – everything becomes sluggish and your bounce rate is getting higher and higher. What could have possibly gone wrong?  There are possible reasons such as you haven’t updated your WordPress core or one or more of your plugins.  Or maybe you have recently inserted or altered a code and it did not showed you the symptoms when you first installed it. Or were there any issues with your web hosting (you have to shoot an email or ticket with your webhosthing to verify). If everything seems to be updated or you haven’t touched any of the codes of your CMS, what is the issue then?  I would strongly recommend that you check your WordPress database as it might or it is now choking because of unhandled prehistoric information. In short if you haven’t heard it, your database might be experiencing “overhead”. An example is if one of the plugins or process of your WordPress needs to run a query that scans all the tables on your MySQL database then this process will take more time than the usual. This will now result into a sluggish website and will lead to readers to leave your website.

 I have some tips for you on how you can optimize your MySQL database if things or scenarios like this occurs.  And there are two options to do it, one is for you to check and optimize the overhead table from your CPANEL and the other one is by installing and adding a WordPress plugin that will do the trick.

A must read:   Website Loading Speed – Quick & Easy Steps To Increase The Speed

How To Optimize WordPress Database Manually From CPANEL phpMyAdmin

1. Login to your website CPANEL and under the category of Databases, look for the icon named phpMyAdmin;

 2. Then when you are redirected to the phpMyAdmin page, look into the left pane of your window and click the database of your WordPress site (I can’t load the screenshot for these for security purposes);

3. Once your database has been loaded, notice the “Overhead” on the right-most of your database headers like the image below. Click that “Overhead” link;

4. The result of click the “Overhead” will sort your table – descending placing those tables with overhead values. All you have to do now is click the link below saying “Check tables having overhead”;

5. Then, after clicking the “Check tables having overhead”, you will notice that those tables with overhead values will be automatically checked. Once everything is checked click the drop-down menu next to “”Check tables having overhead” and look for “Optimize tables” – click it. This will automatically fix that table and optimize it.

Basically, that’s it!

How To Optimize WordPress Database With WordPress Plugin

But if you don’t have access onto your CPANEL and if you are not even sure on what you are doing then a WordPress plugin can do the trick for you to optimize your database.  The best plugin that I’ve been using and could safely recommend is WP-Optimize.  It is a WordPress plugin that can help you optimize your WordPress database if you have no access to your CPANEL phpMyAdmin.

There’s nothing to configure really, all you have to do is add and download this plugin and click it from your dashboard and everything’s actually there and you just need to click it to optimize your tables. Some of the features of WP-Optimize plugin is it allows you to delete post revisions, comments in the spam queue, un-approved comments in just a few seconds.  It also recommends which tables that are needed to be optimized.

A fast-loading website is one of the biggest factor of a successful website, so always optimize.

Tags: Database, Optimize, Performance, Wordpress