First and foremost, BACK UP YOUR Website BEFORE following this tutorial on your own website, please?

There are other options for backuping up a website available here at WS, but I prefer and use the following plugin: Nancy’s tutorial

Page 1 – Pre-Optimizing Your Database
Page 2 – Cleaning Your WordPress Database
Page 3 – Remove Expired Transients from WP Database
Page 4 – Removing Pingbacks and Trackbacks from WP Database
Page 5 – Removing Orphaned Posts Meta Data from WP Database

How I happened upon doing this for my own websites is that while copying & pasting my post titles from the All Post view of my WordPress (in order to start cleaning up my posts), I noticed that quite a few of my post titles displayed as shown below:

This is what some of my titles displayed only AFTER pasted into my Excel spreadsheet. At first it made me wonder, “Locked? What’s that all about?

That is when I got to thinking that perhaps my WordPress database was becoming cluttered with hidden codes of some sort, and is now in need of cleaning... or as some call it, optimizing.

If Excel detected a hidden code like this you can BET the Google spider software would see this sort of clutter too.

Then I remembered a handy plugin that I learned about when planning to merge two of my original affiliate websites back in 2016. That plugin is the first plugin I will talk about here, as I have been using this plugin off and on ever since.

Your WordPress website has a MySQL database behind it and THAT database contains all of the information about your website in separate tables. Every little bit of data from your blog title, author bio and your visitor’s name who comment... it’s all stored in your WordPress MySQL database.

The more changes you make to your WordPress database (changing themes, installing and deleting plugins) new tables get created in your database in order to store that information. Once deletions are made sometimes information gets left behind.

As a WordPress website ages and grows, you will find that a LOT of information gets accumulated in your database; from post and draft revisions to pingbacks and spam. Cleaning your database will optimize your database, making your website load faster... with a side-bonus of gaining extra storage space for the data you really want to keep.

When optimizing my WordPress databases, my older websites started showing that they needed more help than the free version of the first plugin discussed here, has to offer. That is how this tutorial came to be shared with you here.

Next = How to Optimize Your WordPress Database