ThemeGrill AuthorIf you run a WordPress website, you’ll need to optimize the site’s database with a WordPress database plugin at one point or another.
These plugins will help you clean up your old website files, backup the database, reset the database, and do much more in a quick and secure way. So, it’s a good idea to get one for your site’s database optimization as well.
If you’re unsure where to look, we’ve collected 10 of the best WordPress database optimization plugins you can choose from. Before going through them, let’s first understand why you need to optimize your WordPress site database.
Why Optimize Your Website Database with a WordPress Database Plugin?
Before using a database optimization plugin for your WordPress website, it’s essential to understand why you need to optimize a database in the first place.
As you already know, your site’s database is where all of its files are stored. This includes theme files, plugin files, posts, pages, media, user information, etc.
From the moment you create your website, these files keep building up and take up a large amount of space on your database.
Well, no database space is unlimited, so all these files piling up will put a strain on the database. And such a database is more likely to cause issues on your website’s performance.
Whenever a user requests to view your website, a call to the database is sent to retrieve the necessary files. Obviously, it’s harder to sort through and compile the required data through an overloaded database. This results in a slow-loading website on the user’s side.
So, why keep redundant website files stored in your database when it’ll only hamper your site performance, and ultimately, the user experience?
Not just that, leaving your database cluttered makes it harder for you to manage it. Hence, you must optimize website databases either manually or using plugins.
A database optimization plugin will make the job much easier for you by automating the process of optimizing your site database. Even better, some of the plugins offer database backup and reset features as well.
We’ve listed 10 such plugins below that’ll help you keep your database well-managed for smooth and speedy site performance. So, let’s go through each of them.
10 Best WordPress Database Optimization Plugins
1. WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize has become the most popular database management WordPress plugin, thanks to its excellent database optimization features. It’s primarily used as a cache plugin to speed up your site by caching its files.
However, it also provides database optimization tools to quickly clean your database. It clears out unnecessary data from the tables, such as post revisions, pingbacks, and trackbacks. And, it keeps specified weeks’ worth of deleted data in case you want to restore it.
Not only that, but WP-Optimize also offers image compression options to help load images faster and further enhance your site’s speed.
Key Features:
- Minify CSS and JavaScript
- Automatic weekly cleanups
- Provides database statistics
- Cache preloading
- Multisite support
Price: Free or $49/year for a Starter Plan
2. WP Reset
A common way of optimizing databases is resetting them to their default state. WP Reset helps you do precisely that by deleting posts, pages, comments, and database tables.
With this plugin, you can either delete all customizations you’ve made to your site or just delete unnecessary theme settings of your choice. It’s important to note that it doesn’t modify files like plugins, themes, media files, etc.
And if anything goes wrong, you can always restore the deleted data with its 1-click restore functionality.
Key Features:
- Helps speed up testing and debugging
- WP-CLI support for command line reset
- Database snapshots available
- Download backup link
- Superfast reset operation
Price: $39/year for a Personal Plan
3. Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
If you run a successful blog, you must consider managing your post revisions with a plugin like Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions. As the name suggests, you’ll be able to delete post revisions and decrease the load on your database using this plugin.
It’s entirely up to you how many revisions you want to keep or delete. The plugin will keep the specified number of the most recent revisions and delete the rest. You can even exclude a page or post during the optimization if its post revisions are necessary.
Key Features:
- Makes a log of all optimizations
- 1-click database optimization link in admin menu
- Enables you to delete spammed comments
- Delete unused tags
- Scheduled or automatic optimization
Price: Free
4. WP Sweep
Another free WordPress database plugin to help you delete post revisions is WP Sweep. Along with that, it also sweeps orphaned metadata such as post meta and comment meta that cause unnecessary overhead in your database.
Moreover, you can also get rid of duplicate post meta, comment meta, user meta, and more. Besides that, WP Sweep will clean up all the deleted, spammed, and unapproved comments for you.
Key Features:
- Allows to manage transients
- Deletes auto drafts
- Uses WordPress delete functions
- Supports WP-CLI commands
- oEmbed caches in post meta
Price: Free
5. Advanced Database Cleaner
If you’re looking for a WordPress database plugin that’ll repair corrupted databases, Advanced Database Cleaner is the perfect solution. This popular tool will detect corrupted databases and notify you. You can then choose to repair the damaged database to avoid losing valuable data.
Furthermore, the plugin reports which items in your database are unused or orphaned. You’ll also get an overview of the number of tables you have on your website, enabling you to better manage your database.
Key Features:
- Delete pending comments
- Schedule automatic cleanups
- Display active scheduled tasks list
- Specify items to be cleaned
- Search and filter items
Price: $39 for 2 Sites License
6. WP Rocket
Any WordPress user is bound to hear the name WP Rocket at one point. No surprise there since it’s one of the most popular WordPress caching plugins. But besides caching, it also offers dedicated database optimization options.
So, it’ll clean up your redundant database tables, posts, comments, and expired transients in just a few clicks. Better yet, you can set up a schedule for regular cleanups, and WP Rocket automatically cleans and optimizes your website database for you.
Key Features:
- Automatic configuration with RocketCDN
- Cache preloading
- LazyLoad to improve site performance
- GZIP compression
- Minify and combine CSS and JS files
Price: $49 for a Single Site License
7. WPS Cleaner
If you want more flexibility while optimizing your database, WPS Cleaner is the right WordPress database plugin.
It provides individual tabs and cleanup options for posts, comments, themes, media files, and more. Hence, you’ll be able to examine each item or case that needs optimizing and clean them one by one.
Besides that, you can always use the one-click cleanup method for a quicker solution.
Key Features:
- Clean unused plugins and themes
- Displays database tables
- Download backup of unused media
- Clean revisions
- Displays the total number of media
Price: Free
8. Easy WP Cleaner
For a user-friendly tool to optimize database, WordPress plugin Easy WP Cleaner is the right choice. You can easily access the plugin from your WordPress dashboard’s Settings page and quickly clean up your database.
When using Easy WP Cleaner, you don’t have to work with phpMyAdmin and sort through the tables on your own. So, it’s handy for people who aren’t familiar with the technical aspects of optimizing a database.
Key Features:
- Manage drafts and auto-drafts
- Clean up post revisions
- Clean orphan relationships
- Delete trash and spam comments
- Delete orphaned post meta and comment meta
Price: Free
9. Database Toolset
Database Toolset is a clean database WordPress plugin that lets you use native SQL functions for the optimization process. Besides optimization, you can also use them to perform scheduled database backups for WordPress websites automatically.
Like other database optimization plugins, it lets you remove post revisions, spammed comments, drafts, and more. And the best thing is that you can use this plugin completely free.
Key Features:
- Remove dashboard transient feed
- Clean moderated comments
- Allows to download backups
- Supports use of native SQL functions
- User-friendly interface
Price: Free
10. Smart Cleanup Tools
Smart Cleanup Tools boasts a total of 37 tools for database cleanup and reset. Using this complete toolset, you can remove any unnecessary data cluttering your site’s tables.
Suppose you don’t need all the available tools for a cleanup. In that case, you’re free to disable them individually from the plugin’s Settings panel. You’ll also find estimated records of orphaned data, including the number of items and their estimated size. This way, you have a clear grasp on what and how much optimization each tool is performing.
Key Features:
- Lets you remove WooCommerce sessions
- Delete RSS feeds cache
- Multisite support
- Export and import plugin settings
- AJAX cleanup operations
Price: $30 for a Regular License
Conclusion
If you need to unload your website database and improve the overall performance of the website, WordPress database plugins are your best bet.
The plugins listed above will clean up databases for you with the click of a few buttons. Some even have dedicated features for WordPress database backup and reset. Hence, you should have no problem optimizing your database, even without technical knowledge.
Plus, most of these plugins are free. So, you can try them and see for yourself if these WordPress database tools are what your site needs.
Besides database plugins, you can use cache plugins and image optimization plugins to further enhance your site’s performance.
That’s it for this article. If interested, you should explore our blog for more WordPress-related articles.
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