How To Maintain Your WordPress Database Nicely

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How To Maintain Your WordPress Database Nicely

The database is the heart of a website and so ensuring its well being is extremely important. For the most part, the database of a site determines its speed and performance. Now you might be thinking, usually, the loading speed of websites depends on the media content it has, then what’s the role of databases in that?

Well, the database of your WordPress website might contain unnecessary information that’s of no use and needs to be cleaned. So, when someone retrieves the information from your site, processing it takes too much time that contributes to slow page load.

Take for instance spam comments, though you don’t require it to keep your site up and running it will take up space in your database and interfere with your site’s performance.

In this blog, we will take a look at some of the best practices to maintain your WordPress database and the tools you can use to filter out the spam comments.

Butbefore you start grasping the details, I want you to make aware of a customer-driven web design company in Los Angeles - SFWP Experts. Offering IT and digital marketing services to businesses all over the world for years, this company has emerged as a top coding partner in the US in recent days. 

With that coming to an end, let’s shift our focus to the major topic in the article - how to maintain your WordPress website perfectly.

5 Best Practices To Maintain Database of Your WordPress Website

1. Take Your Database Backups Regularly

Following this step is pretty important since it’s a risky task to edit your WordPress database without having a proper backup. God forbid, if something goes wrong with your database when making changes, you will obviously want to undo the edits you just made. 

There are more than one way to backup your WordPress database. One route you can take is navigating phpMyAdmin and then utilizing the controls on cPanel in your hosting account. 

Another way to do this is to manually export the information from your WordPress dashboard by heading to Tools > Export. 

Once you have taken a backup of your WordPress database you can make the changes you want to perform. However, if you want to take Wordpress developer experts' suggestions over whether you should remove your old content or update it, our Los Angeles web design company is the most apt to provide you with a solid answer. We will thoroughly check the effectiveness of your old blog posts and then determine if it should be given no space in the database or updated for better outcomes.

2. Use Plugins To Delete The Record of Old Post Revisions  

Do you know WordPress has a built-in revision system for old posts? Yes, it actually keeps a record of all the drafts you create and the posts you update on your site. Not just this, it also allows you to reverse the changes and restore the posts as it was earlier.

Though this feature comes in handy for several reasons, it can also be detrimental to the health of your database. Assume that your database is keeping the details of your old post revisions for a few years now, then chances are it would have piled up and consuming huge space there. This will ultimately result in increased load time of your WordPress website. 

For this reason, you should consider limiting the revisions to your database stores. You can do this by just adding a simple code to the wp-config.php file of your WordPress website:

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3 ); 

Are you looking for a professional firm to leverage database maintenance services? Collaborate with our Los Angeles web design company, SFWPExpert to take advantage of well-designed database solutions. This will not only improve your site performance but user experience as well when they will be able to get the information as quickly as they want. 

3. Install Akismet For Spam Comment Filtering

In your database, there are various types of data available other than outdated revisions. One of them is spam comments that are posted on your blog posts. Sometimes, it can be a headache to manage this but you can’t really ignore it because it is an integral part of the website maintenance. 

You know viewing spam comments is like an eyesore, but what you might not know is that it also affects the security and performance of your WordPress site when your database is overloaded. 

The optimal solution you can go to deal with this issue is to install and active a spam-filtering plugin called Akismet. Now why I have said you to do this even after knowing that WordPress deletes spam comments after 30 days? Because it’s still a long time considering plenty of comments can be added in that period to the wp_comments table in your database. 

Alternatively, you can also do a set in your WordPress dashboard to manually approve comments before publishing it. Even better, we can create a custom software with a small form to capture essential details of users before they post a comment. All you have to do is get in contact with our Los Angeles web design company and describe your requirements.

4. Review And Reset Your Plugins Settings To Minimize Unused Tools

The rule of thumb for easy WordPress website maintenance is to have a lesser number of plugins - only that are needed. The more plugins you install, the more time it will require to update and manage them. And the problem doesn’t end here since it takes up a huge space in your database collectively and could make it difficult for you to deal with compatibility and security issues.

Plus, many plugins store their settings in your WordPress database even after you have deactivated it. They sit idle there and make your database heavier than you might think of. So, I recommend you to delete those plugins if you think you won’t need it anytime soon. Also, look for plugins that offer “remove all data” option to uninstall and make sure you don’t miss out using it. 

Another practice you can adopt to remove plugins is to get rid of it in bulk by clicking on the Inactive link on the Plugins page.

Select all the plugins you don’t want to see there and then click on the Delete option found in the dropdown menu of Bulk Actions. Act the same way to manage your WordPress themes as well. 

If there is something else you want to know about theme and plugins management, don’t forget to shoot your questions at us. Being the earliest web design company in Los Angeles, we have collected several years of experience in website creation and maintenance field and are always eager to provide its advantage to our clients.

5. Utilize The WordPress Database Optimization Tool

To let you know, WordPress has a built-in optimization tool that usually people exploit to repair and maintain their database. Using this particular tool you can scan your database to identify any potential issues that could damage it.

Though this tool is not active by default when you download WordPress, you can turn it on any time by adding a single line of code “define( 'WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true );” to your wp-config.php file. Then save the changes you made and go to http://your-site.com/wp-admin/maint/repair.php to insert your domain name in your URL. 

Furthermore, you can choose any of the two options there among Repair Database or Repair and Optimize Database to restore the health of your database. 

Conclusion   

So, this was all I thought to share with you via this blog. If you need more information on how to maintain your WordPress database, make sure you give us a call or just drop an email describing what you wish to know. With a powerful web design and development team, our experienced Wordpress website design company, SFWP Experts is capable enough to drive more visitors to client’s sites by implementing effective strategies. We can make a lot of difference to your customer acquisition numbers by providing services like WordPress web design, web development, website maintenance, database maintenance, PPC, SEO, internet marketing, and all.   

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