One of the most essential tasks of keeping your blog healthy, fast, and well-performing, is optimizing your WordPress database. WordPress uses MySQL to create tables and databases to store data. And as you develop and grow your website you start adding too many redundant tables and databases. If you want your website or personal blog to run well you will need to remove all of these unnecessary things which is exactly what “database optimization” means.
Having a huge database is one of the main reasons for having a slow WordPress site. It’s mandatory to keep optimizing that database from time to time as it will help your website perform much better. Of course, having a great WordPress website hosting provider is mandatory, but now we’ll share when WP-Optimize comes in most handy.
How Does the Plugin Help?
WordPress creates a revision of a post or a page every time you create one. When you edit, for example, 6 times, a post, you will have 5 copies of that post or page as revision. If those pages or posts are longer than the usual, it’s a huge number of byes that overhead your MySQL.
Database Optimization
What WP-Optimize does is allow you to optimize and shrink your posts table as it removes post revisions from the database that are no longer needed.
Another thing that can happen is, that there might be lots of spam and un-approved comments. That’s when the plugin helps again. It cleans and removes those spam and un-approved comments easily.
WP-Optimize checks all of the tables in your database and those that are overloaded it takes care of, allowing you to get rid of what’s unnecessary.
Image-Compression
Another amazing feature of the plugin is the image-compression that helps convert large images into compressed files. It enables you to compress PNG, JPG, GIF, BMP, and TIF pictures up to 5MG in size, and it’s packed with other useful features, including:
- Compress multiple existing images at the same time.
- Compression algorithm, that gives you twice the compression with much less loss of resolution.
- Retrieve or revert back to your original images at any point.
- Auto-compress function, which automatically compresses images as they’re added to the site.
- ‘Compress Big Files function’ allows you to compress images up to 64MB- much higher than any other plugin.
Page Caching
The feature that will be probably most important for your website performance is page caching. You will see the difference quickly. Caching includes keeping dynamic data in a temporary storage area so that it can be retrieved in an instant. Caching is a sure-fire way to ensure that web pages load at a lightning-fast speed.
WordPress processes the dynamic PHP files to generate a certain page, and WP-Optimize saves it into a static HTML file in the cache folder, so that when the next user visits, the page is cached and doesn’t need processing. This is great for your speed performance, thus, for your website visitors and their good impression.
“Overall WP-Optimize brings the best cache and optimization technology together in a single seamless plugin to make your WordPress site fast, lean and efficient.”
How to Use WP-Optimize
Since we are talking about your WordPress database, you need to make sure that you create a complete WordPress backup before moving forward. It’s a step that needs to be taken regularly. Next, install and activate WP-Optimize.
Once you have activated the plugin, on your WordPress dashboard’s left bar, click on the WP-Optimize settings button. You will now be on the WP-Optimize page where you can do all of the above-mentioned tasks. From the “Actions” section you can select the optimization processes.
Why You Need WP-Optimize in Conclusion
Keeping a website well and fast performing, you need to take care of it. WordPress doesn’t always allow you to do that manually, and to be honest, you don’t need to do it this way. There are easy ways to make your work more pleasant, fast, and easily achievable. Many plugins help you keep your website in the best condition but there are a few plugins that are mandatory to have.
To take care of your posts, pages, and your website in general, this plugin will help you clean the unnecessary, optimize your database, compress the images, cache your pages, and present to your users a great up and fast running site that everyone wants to come back to.