Removing bloat that is being stored in your site’s database can help improve your site’s performance and it is worth taking the time to make sure that you perform database optimization weekly or at least monthly.
If you have added tags on your posts or on products in WooCommerce in the past, then chances are high that there are some tags that you do not use anymore but they are still part of your site’s database.
An easy plugin option to be able to delete unused tags is the Mass Delete Unused Tabs plugin. After you have installed and activated the plugin it will add a menu item under plugins;
Plugins > Delete all unused tags
It may take a few seconds depending on the number of tags to be deleted. The plugin usually deletes 50 unused tags (terms) at a time so do the math for the number of unused tags on your website.
If you are using the Akismet plugin and service on your site for spam protection which stores metadata. After some time these metadata are not of any use and it may not get cleaned up by the plugin itself.
The Akismet plugin has a daily cron event which should remove the old commentmeta data named;
akismet_scheduled_delete
The data relating to the Akismet plugin would be stored in the wp_commentmeta database table on the site.
The WP-Optimize plugin which has been covered before has an option to be able to easily delete unused Akismet metadata being stored in your site’s database.
WP-Optimize > Database
Using these straightforward plugin solutions will help you be able to keep your site’s database optimized so that your site is performing well.
