Over time, some useless data accumulates in the WordPress database. Examples of such data are spam comments, deleted comments or article revisions. Although these entries are not directly harmful, they should still be removed regularly. It’s really easy with the WordPress plugin WP-Sweep by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
I use this little plugin on all my blogs and niche sites to free the WordPress database from unnecessary ballast. For this reason, I would like to show you in this small guide how the plugin works and how you can clean up the WordPress database with WP-Sweep.
Clean up WordPress Database with WP-Sweep
Simply go to the plugins option on WordPress, click “Add New” and type ‘WP-Sweep.’ You can then install and activate it to start using.
Since this plugin is a free plugin, it can also be found in the official plugin directory. Then simply Install Now and then click Activate and the plugin is already installed and ready for use.
The entry for using the WP-Sweep plugin can be found in the left menu under Tools.
If you call up WP-Sweep, you immediately get a clear overview of the current status. Each option is divided into different areas:
- Post Cleanup
- comment cleanup
- user cleanup
- Disambiguation
- Option Cleanup
- Database Cleanup
Each option that can be cleaned offers two different buttons on the far right. Clean up and details. Cleanup should be obvious. Under Details, you can see more detailed information about the options that can be cleaned.
But there is also the possibility to have the WordPress database completely cleaned up and thus optimized in one step. The corresponding option is at the very bottom of the page.
Depending on how long the database hasn’t been cleaned up, the whole action will of course take more or less time. Of course everything but under a minute.
This is how the plugin works
Of course, one could now think that WP-Sweep simply sends the appropriate commands to the database (MySQL delete queries) to clean up and thus removes the corresponding content. But that’s not the case.
Instead, the plugin uses WordPress delete functions. At least as long as they are available. In my opinion, this makes using this plugin a bit safer.
WP-Sweep can clean up and optimize the following areas:
- revisions
- Automatic drafts
- Unapproved Comments
- Spam Comments
- Deleted Comments
- Orphaned post metadata
- Orphaned comment metadata
- Orphaned user metadata
- Orphaned term metadata
- Orphaned term reference data
- Unused terms
- Duplicate post metadata
- Duplicate comment metadata
- Duplicate user metadata
- Duplicate term metadata
- Transient options
- Optimizes database tables
- Embed cache in post metadata
You can easily install the plugin via the WordPress admin interface. If you want, you can also download the plugin as a ZIP file from the official plugin directory here. There is also some more information and reviews about WP-Sweep.
Here is a complete WP-Sweep tutorial that will help you understand how to use the plugin:
