Having a slow WordPress or WooCommerce website is not good. It can affect your overall revenue, ranking, and conversion rates. This post is for you if you want to optimize your database to improve your site’s performance. This article will show you the best database optimization plugins for WordPress to help optimize your WordPress site for better performance.
But first, let’s see why we need to optimize our database and how an unoptimized database slows down a website. Let’s have a look.
Why Database Optimization Is a Must
Database optimization is a must if you need to increase the speed and performance of your WordPress website.
In 2018, Google said it would use website speed as a ranking factor. So if you have great content but a slower website, you won’t rank higher than your competitors.
To cater to that, there are several techniques known for speeding up a website, like choosing the best WordPress hosting, using a lightweight theme, using well-coded plugins, compressing images, minifying static files, etc.
But most people usually forget about database optimization at all.
Remember that it is the database that holds our website’s content and stores them securely. So when a visitor lands on any blog posts, your web server will fetch content from the database. If the database is bulky, the process will take more time, and the loading time will be high.
On the other hand, an optimized database will help you speed up the loading time and have a good experience.
What Causes Your Database to Slow Down
Multiple things can affect your database. A few things you need to note are:
- Unused WordPress Themes and Plugins
- Post Revisions
- Spam Comments
- Trashed Posts
- Trashed Comments
We will take a quick look at each option before moving forward.
- Unused WordPress Themes and Plugins: You can activate only one WordPress theme at one time. So, no point in keeping multiple themes installed as it will only bloat your website. Instead, delete them to increase disk space and performance. Similarly, you can also delete unused WordPress plugins from your website.
- Post Revisions: When you update your posts, pages, or custom post types, WordPress will save a revision of the old version. This won’t be required in most cases. So, limiting the revisions or clearing them from the website will help you boost your performance.
- Spam Comments: Using a tool like Akismet, you can automatically filter all spam comments. But keeping them on your WordPress website is not ideal. You have no use for spam comments. So, deleting them would help you optimize the database.
- Trashed Posts: There can be multiple reasons to trash a post. But keeping the trashed posts on your WordPress website is not a good practice as it fills up your MySQL database.
- Trashed Comments: Trashed comments are also an unwanted load and can affect your database negatively.
So, to help you with database optimization, there are several dedicated WordPress database plugins. Using a plugin will make your job easier to clear everything you do not need in your MySQL database.
Things to Look for in a Database Optimization Plugin
When choosing a database optimization plugin for WordPress, make sure to check these things:
- Ease of Use: Is the plugin easy to use, or is any additional technical knowledge required?
- Features: Are they dedicated to database optimization only? Or do they offer any additional optimization features?
- Support: Do they provide support if you need help with the plugin?
- Security: Are the plugins receiving regular updates and security patches?
Well, we researched for you and found the best plugins you can rely on.
Best Database Optimization Plugins for WordPress
This section will cover the best database optimization plugins for WordPress. They are:
- WP-Optimize
- WP Rocket
- WP-Sweep
- WP Reset
- WP-DBManager
Let’s see what each plugin has to offer without any further ado. So, you can pick a plugin for optimizing your database according to the requirements.
1) WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize is one of the most popular WordPress database plugins to clean your WordPress or WooCommerce store. It comes with an easy-to-use interface, which will help everyone customize the plugin very quickly. Apart from database optimization, WP-Optimize can help everyone with image optimization, caching, and more.
The plugin offers several optimization features to help you clean your database from unused data, such as trashed posts, comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks. On top of that, the plugin can do the job if you run a multi-author blog and need to clean up your database every day or week. In addition, WP-Optimize has a scheduling feature that will help the owner clean the database after a specific interval.
Moreover, the image optimization feature will enable lazy loading for your images to improve the image serving speed. Other notable features of WP-Optimize are WP-CLI support and multisite support. These are useful for advanced WordPress users. Lastly, WP-Optimize’s minification feature can help you compress HTML, CSS, and JavaScript without using third-party tools or minification plugins.
Features
- Database Optimization
- Image Optimization
- Caching
- WP-CLI Support
- Easy to Use
- Multisite Support
Pricing
WP-Optimize is a freemium WordPress plugin. The free version is available via the WordPress repository, while you can get the premium version for $49 a year.
2) WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a popular caching plugin for WordPress. However, to help you optimize your website more, the development team added a feature to clean the databases! So if you prefer a complete WordPress caching plugin with database optimization features, this might be your best choice.
With WP Rocket, you can take your website’s performance to the next level. The tool comes with a lot of features, and also it is straightforward to use and configure. The tool comes with the database optimization feature out of the box. So, there is no need to use a dedicated tool to clean your database, as WP Rocket has got you covered.
Besides, WP Rocket offers several other popular features like image optimization, GZIP compression, CDN integrations, etc. With image optimization, you can take care of the image serving. GZIP optimization will ensure your overall WordPress site is not affected by any performance issues. While the CDN integration will help you if you integrate a CDN provider with your WordPress/WooCommerce installation.
Apart from that, WP Rocket’s support team is doing an excellent job. If you have any issues with the plugin, you can contact them directly by submitting a ticket. Then, within 24 business hours, your problems will be solved! They have one of the finest support teams in the industry.
Features
- Caching
- Image Optimization
- File Optimization
- eCommerce Optimization
- CDN Integration
- Great Support Team
Pricing
WP Rocket is a premium WordPress plugin. And it will cost you $49/year for a single domain license.
3) WP-Sweep
If you prefer a minimalist plugin that does its job perfectly, you must check out WP-Sweep. WP-Sweep can help you clean your WordPress database with just a few mouse clicks. However, like other database optimization plugins, this tool doesn’t have any fancy features – it serves only one purpose: database optimization.
Since it comes with lightweight code, the tool won’t affect your website’s speed and performance. Using this plugin, you can clean your posts, comments, users, terms, options, and database.
The best part about WP-Sweep is the easy-to-use user interface. The UI is straightforward, and everyone will understand the optimization possibilities better. They have also labeled the available options so users can know what they are doing.
With WP-Sweep, you can manually wipe individual items like terms, users, posts, and comments. On the other hand, if you need to clean your entire WordPress website, just click on the Sweep All button. That will clean your entire website within a couple of minutes.
Features
- Easy to Use
- Lightweight
- Minimalist Design
- Multiple Optimization Options
- Optimized for Performance
Pricing
WP-Sweep is a free WordPress database optimization plugin. You can download the tool can from the WordPress plugins repository for free.
4) WP Reset
This plugin is different from the rest of the list. WP Reset is a WordPress plugin that can help you reset your entire WordPress website. This is the best plugin if you already have a working WordPress website but want to start from scratch again.
However, resetting a fully configured WordPress site is a bit challenging. Manually deleting the posts, pages, and custom post types will take a long time. Also, if you have multiple plugins and themes, deleting them one by one might be a challenging task.
That’s where WP Reset can be helpful. With the WP Reset plugin, you can wipe out your entire data without any hassle. It will only take one click of a button, and you will have a new WordPress website. But don’t worry, the plugin won’t delete the media files, and you will have total control over them.
Since it will wipe the database, the plugin has a feature allowing users to create a snapshot of their database. However, this will only create a backup of your database. It will not help you save the media library.
Besides, the plugin is developer friendly and 100% WP-CLI compatible. Moreover, you can also store the snapshots in cloud service partners like Dropbox, Google Drive, or iCloud. You can access the snapshots without having a local copy by uploading the snapshots to any of the cloud services.
Features
- One-Click Reset
- Easy to Use
- WP-CLI Support
- Snapshots
- Safe Media Libraries
Pricing
WP Reset is a freemium WordPress plugin. The free version can be downloaded from the WordPress plugins repository. The premium version will cost you $39 a year.
5) WP-DBManager
If you are looking for an all-in-one WordPress plugin for database management, you should check out WP-DBManager. The plugin gives you all the details about your database, like database host, name, type, user, version, and a list of the available database tables with their usage. This information can help better understand what is happening with the database.
WP-DBManager comes with an excellent list of features. Some notable features are database backup, optimization, repairing, etc. If you prefer backing up the database every day or week, its database backup manager will be helpful. Using the backup manager, you can modify your existing databases and other related things. Also, if you prefer, you can email the backup file to any email address from the same page.
Regarding database optimization, they have got a deep clean technology. You can clean every inch of your database and wipe all unwanted data. Also, the SQL query wizard will help you run SQL commands right through the WordPress dashboard. Usually, to run the query, you must log in to the cPanel and access the MySQL database tables. The Run SQL Query feature offered by WP-DBManager will help you save some time.
Features
- View Database Information
- Backup database
- Optimization
- Repairing
- Run SQL Query
- Empty Tables
Pricing
WP-DBManager is a free WordPress plugin, and you can download it from the WordPress plugins repository.
Conclusion: Best Database Optimization Plugins for WordPress
If you have a WordPress site or WooComemrces store, understand that database optimization is not optional – it is a must. It will greatly increase the performance of your site and improve your visitor’s user experience. In this article, we have covered the best plugins to help you optimize your WordPress databases. These include:
- WP-Optimize
- WP Rocket
- WP-Sweep
- WP Reset
- WP-DBManager
Each plugin has unique features and is also easy to use. For example, if you prefer a dedicated solution for cleaning your MySQL database, you should check out WP-Optimize. It is one of the best plugins we have found in this market.
On the other hand, WP Rocket is a mix of WordPress cache plugins and database optimization plugins. So if you need to use a single plugin for enabling caching inside your WordPress website and optimizing the database, check out WP Rocket.
Next up, WP Reset will help you wipe out the entire database without any hassle. This is the best option if you need to start from scratch again. Finally, WP-Sweep and WP-DBManager are other lightweight database optimization plugins you can try. Both of them work well and come with minimal configuration options.
So which of the WordPress database plugins are you going to use? Let us know in the comments.
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