Why You Should Optimize Your WordPress Database
When operating a website, many people don’t bring much significance to getting rid of unwanted data. For example, they don’t pay attention to the number of low-quality plugins that they’ve installed or pictures they’ve added by mistake that haven’t been deleted afterward. They also keep forgetting to empty their trash folder when deleting a page, as well as many other things that interfere with the website’s performance. Like this, all this unnecessary data keeps piling up, in turn making one’s website slower and harder to use.
In case you’re using WordPress, optimizing your database is an absolute necessity if you want to have a fast website. We decided to introduce you to the basic principles of web performance optimization and why it’s important to optimize your WordPress database.
What is web performance optimization?
In general, web performance optimization is a string of processes that has a function of maximizing your website’s performance. This usually means deletion of all unnecessary data and improvement of all other necessary elements for your website.
In short, the goal of web performance optimization is to polish your website in such a way that will coincide with the requirements of the users who click on your page. In other words, good web optimization leads you to more conversions and a lower bounce rate.
What is a WordPress database?
If you own a website that is powered by WordPress, then you also have a WordPress database for it. A WordPress database is a place that stores all data of your website, i.e. your pages, posts, comments, your theme and plugin settings, and so on.
Why optimize it?
We’ve established that the more unnecessary data your WordPress database has, the slower your website gets. That means there more chances of your visitors deciding not to visit your site again. And obviously, nobody wants to lose their visitors.
Not only is optimizing your WordPress database important because of user experience, it is also necessary because of search engines. That’s because during the website ranking process, Google gives great importance to the website’s speed. The obvious logic behind it is that a website with slow performance brings bad user experience. Therefore, sites with such a status shouldn’t be promoted in the same way as those speedy sites that users continuously go back to.
By optimizing your database, you get rid of any unneeded data, which in turn shrinks the size of your database. The ultimate result is faster and overall better performance of your website, and by extension, more conversions.
Final thoughts
Even when you think that there’s nothing in your database that requires removal, you should still make sure to clean your cache, as lots of deleted files and plugins can still leave some traces behind them. You shouldn’t forget to delete your spam and trash comments either.
Since plenty of unnecessary data piles up in your WordPress database with time, we advise you to clean it up regularly for the best results. Also, checking your website speed from time to time can prove useful as well.
For more instructions, see our detailed guide on how to optimize WordPress database.
We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!
