Clean Up Your WordPress Database: Old Plugins
Posted By: Behrad 
Monday 14 March 2011 
11 Comments
A couple of days ago I wrote a post called Clean Up Your WordPress Database: Post Revisions in which I explained how you could clean up your WordPress database. In this post I’ll get to another part of cleaning your database. As you know you can extend the possibilities of your WordPress powered blog with plugins. However, some of the plugins store their data inside your database.
Just to give you an idea; for a long time I’ve used a plugin called WordPress Popular Posts to display the 10 most popular posts. This worked like a charm till I actually checked the size of my database which was 27,8 MB! This was really huge and when I looked deeper I saw that the table which was used by WordPress Popular Posts was over 15 MB! This is when I decided to go and look for another plugin.
The total size after deleting old plugin's settings.
So upon installing a new plugin to display the popular posts I deleted the plugin but also the tables which were created by WordPress Popular Posts. But I also noticed that I still had some other tables in my database which were from some old plugins which I tested, so I deleted those as well. After deleting the unnecessary tables and optimizing my database, I had shrinked the size of my database from 27,8MB to 10.7MB!!
It’s actually not a big problem that plugins store their settings into the database, as the settings will remained saved even if you’ve disabled / deleted the plugins so you can use it another time. However this also means that you can have different tables created in your database but tables which you don’t need and table which increase your database size.
So in case you’ve been testing some plugins you should also pay attention to your database. Make sure to login and look at your WordPress database once in a while and see if there are any tables created by plugins which you don’t use and delete them if you’re sure that you’re not going to use them again.
Ow, what ever you do; be careful and make sure to backup your database before deleting any tables!
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owh something like that… the files become larger time to time… erm..
That’s right! The bigger the blog, the bigger the files and its database!
there is a plugin that will do that and I have forgotten what the name was. You see, I am a lazy bum and even the previous revisions stuffs, I have a plugin that cleaned them up for me..
I know! That’s why I love WordPress as you can find a plugin for almost anything. However I like to work with as many plugins as possible to keep the blog lightweight and load faster. This is why I prefer to work directly in the database.
Thank you for the database tip!
TentBlogger’s Optimize WordPress Database Plugin seems to do the job.
http://tentblogger.com/optimize-wordpress-database/
Sorry, pls ignore my reply – except for that thank you:)
Looks like tentblogger isn’t cleaning out the database after all… Could be a multisite issue, I’ve too little experience to tell. Either way, I’ll do it your way.
WordPress is awesome .
you think something and you can get it done .
Or hire some one to get it done if its new.
thanks:)
I don’t know that Popular Posts plugin consumes too much space like that. Can you tell me the plugin that you used and work for you but limit the size of database?
WordPress really is so user friendly that it makes a visitor’s time spent on the blog more interesting. Also, reading such informative posts on database clean up makes the readers have a closer look at how a WP blog actually functions.
[...] the database: The last time I had “cleaned” the database was about a year ago. With this my database is 40MB, which is still too big! So [...]