Does your blog slow down to a crawl? Are your visitors complaining that they can’t read your endless drivel the minute you post it? Is your life miserable because you thought you were a WordPress god?
These are serious questions to ponder, particularly now that the danger from the end of Mayan days has passed.
You can optimize your blog in 5 minutes, literally, with the use of a WordPress plugin. If you’re not using WordPress, now it’s the time to switch and get on with the times.
For starters, WordPress stores revisions of posts, versions that are automatically saved as you type along. If you take a pee break, WordPress will save a revision for you; these revisions can creep up into the thousands of entries.
“Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions” is a wonderful solution, and can be searched for from within WordPress, in order to install – or you can download it directly from the WordPress Plugin Directory.
Once installed, you can start the Optimization in the WP Admin Panel » Tools » Optimize Database. It took two seconds to optimize more than 2,500 posts on DomainGang, deleting 14,000 revisions and saving almost 30 Mb of database space!
One down, two to go.
As most other bloggers, you probably also use the “Visitor Maps and Who’s Online” plugin; after using it for a year we discovered its logs were packing 120 Mb of data!
Unfortunately, there is no way to delete the logs – you can either uninstall it, thus deleting the log data and re-install it, or use phpMyAdmin in CPanel to empty that particular table, then compact it. This second option, requires switching to “expert domainer” mode and we can’t be held responsible for any loss of data, so you’re on your own.
Lastly, if you are using another useful plugin called “Redirection“, that manages your 301 and 404 errors elegantly, this too stores logs that can grow to a crazy size. So delete that log file from within its options regularly.
In total, we saved almost 160 Mb of database space, which translates to faster, smoother loading of web content. The DomainGang database is now optimized and ready to take on 2013 in stride.
Enjoy your Christmas! 😀
