During Jessica Gardners talk , WordPress Development for Non-Developers: An Introductory Tour Under the Hood, the discussion turned on how to clean the various database tables associated with a WordPress site. Mary Ann Shew, who had just delivered the lecture before, on Piecing Together the WordPress Puzzle, suggested the inevitable – there must be a plugin for that.
And so back in the corner two of us looked up in the WordPress plugins directory and discovered WP-Optimize.
As you can see from the screenshot to the left, WP-Optimize has some impressive plugin statistics. So we both said it would be worthwhile testing out this free plugin.
So during the lunch break, ye editor had an opportunity to download the plugin for testing. And theOpenSourcery.com website, which has accumulated 2-3 years worth of post and page revisions, plus lots of comment spam, and other WP detritus – this would be the perfect testbed for discovering the effectiveness of WP-Optimize.
And the test runs on theOpenSourcery proved to be very successful. I used only the safe data-cleaning options of WP Optimize.
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WP-Optimize results were quite pleasing – the database table sizes were cut more than in half from 55.9 to 22.6MB. And in the general settings users can specify how many revisions per page or post to retain. This is an admin plugin which you can deactivate and then re-activate when required, sparing the website start-up load. Even though WP-Optimize is a free plugin I have donated $25 to the developer. It is really good.