When you install a plug in on your WordPress site and then you remove it, chances are it’s going to leave behind some scraps in your sights filesystem. This is referred to as bloat, and it’s all over WordPress. There are many different kinds of bloat.

If a plugin creates tables in your database, it doesn’t clean up when you ask it to. These are known as arfin tables. Or maybe you delete a plugin and then you reinstall it only to find that all of your settings are still intact. That means that your WordPress options table had some orphaned entries and it probably still does. OK, I’m just getting started because WordPress is actually kind of a giant slop. It leaves behind a mess everywhere you go and after everything you do.

But we love it because modularity. So what to do about it. Chances are right now you have hundreds of old provisions, autograph spam comments and orphan metadata just sitting around on your server, taking up space and contributing absolutely nothing to your hosting bill. And this video I’m going to be showing you advance database cleaner approach really should be included in the WordPress core, but it’s not. And so you’ll have to watch this video to find out why everyone who actively manages the WordPress website should be using this plugin.

And no, it’s not a sponsored video. And yes, there is a link in the description. All right. Let’s just get a few things out of the way. First of all, I hate the word bloat database bloat, code bloat. Let’s just stop using this word to describe digital things. Bloat makes me think of disgusting things like how I feel after eating my weight in pizza. What we’re really talking about is inefficiency, which, to be honest, doesn’t really even mean something isn’t good enough.

If it’s inefficient, it could still work like Elementor.

It creates pages with inefficient code when compared to oxygen, but it’s still good enough because the regular person can actually use it. And the end results are that their pages load fast enough so that they sell out of their organic lipstick or their non GMO snacks or whatever it is that you people are selling. Back to my point, this is profitable tools, not efficient tools. We’re here to grow businesses and build wealth. I have schoolyard fights about bloat. Look, we all want our websites to be perfect.

Little Marie Kondo approved havens of perfection and organization and tranquility. But honestly, that is just never going to be the case.

But on the other hand, slow websites do decrease conversion rates, and I just can’t live with that. So if your website is on the older side, maybe you’ve installed and deleted dozens of plug ins and themes over the years.

Let’s spark some joy and get your WordPress website shipshape. OK, we’re going to start off with the free version, which is just called advanced database cleaner Sande’s Pro. You can get it in the WordPress repository. Just search, click, install and activate. Seriously, don’t expect miracles here.

Most of the time a little database bloat isn’t actually going to hurt your site’s performance unless it already is, which is probably why you’re watching this video. So what you can expect is that your site speed will modestly increase, the size of your database will get a little bit smaller, and queries to your database can potentially be faster because there’s less to search. Hello, e-commerce sites are you listening to set your expectations? What we’re really looking for is that nicely defrag feeling.

We used to get back in the windows 95 days. Kids ask your parents. To me, the biggest benefit is that when the database is smaller, backups are faster, so they require less remote storage. That also means that backups restore faster.

Which reminds me warning before doing anything to your database, always make a complete backup.

You can make a mistake and really screw things up. Or you could do things completely, perfectly and still get unexpected results and lose data.

So always have a backup backed up. Good, let’s go.

So we’re using the free version we just installed. Click on tools and then choose WP cleaner in the general cleanup session. You’ll see everything the free version can do. You’re pretty safe to select all in bulk clean here, but you might want to consider leaving the last few days of post revisions, trash posts and auto drafts. I’m going to select all and delete. Boom, optimize a lot of plug ins can do what I just did, but not all of them have the ability to keep recent posts and most don’t have the scheduling ability that we’re going to look at next click, add new schedule, give it a name, something obvious.

Choose your frequency and tasks that you’d like to have completed and schedule. You can always edit or delete your schedule from the general settings page. Now, this stuff is all good fun, but we’re not really getting the deep cleaning power that we want out of this free version. So eventually we’re going to have to look at the pro version. Now, before we do that, next to the general cleanup tab, you’ll see tabs for tables, options and crap jobs.

Tables are shelves in the WordPress database. WordPress comes with 11 default tables, but sometimes we install a plug in and it adds tables to the database. This is fine and good. It’s just how things are supposed to function. But sometimes we outgrow plugins and delete them, yet the tables get left behind. Blasphemy outrage.

Actually, no, this is often on purpose. So you see this simple decision to leave tables in the database can actually save businesses from important data loss. If you delete a plugin, data goes away. It can be a bad thing.

Now, it would actually be very annoying if every time you disable the plugin, you had to then reconfigure it because all of your settings were disabled.

So you can see there’s a lot of reason not to have this information disappear. But unfortunately, a lot of plugin developers don’t give you any way to actually uninstall the plugin. Shout out to my favorites that actually do like login press. So disabling and uninstalling plugins don’t typically remove tables and you’re left with arfin tables. That’s inefficient. Let’s clean it up. Unfortunately, the free version of Advanced Database Cleaner doesn’t let you see who owns the database tables. But if you are a WordPress sleuth and way more confident than I am, you can take action to the tables.

The free version does allow you to remove them, but once we go pro the real power sets in now I can scan my tables and find the orphans. These are tables from plug ins I deleted and no longer need. I can safely delete them and make my database a little bit less bloated. I mean inefficient. The options and Kronstadt work the same way as the tables tab. You’re going to need the pro version to get all of the features.

So after you grab your pro version with the link in the description, install it and then click over to the options tab where you can scan your options table. This is going to be very similar to what we just did in the tables tab. We’re going to find and eliminate the orphans. I recommend going through them carefully and making sure you don’t accidentally delete anything of value for me. I notice some LearnDash options that were identified as orphans, although I do have a LearnDash installed.

Honestly, I’m not sure if I could delete them. Maybe they came from a different plugin, but I decided to be safe and just hang on to them. Obviously, before you do anything, you have a backup like we already talked about, right? Cleaning up in the options tab is where you’re poised to see the most noticeable increase in performance. And that’s because options often auto load on every single page of your WordPress site. That’s what the auto load column means.

Advanced database cleaner prote does give you the option to disable auto load if needed. The last tab is Krans. Qurans are scheduled TASC things like sending emails or cleaning up log files. These tasks could be running regularly in the background for your site, for plug ins that are not even installed anymore. Once again, scan your Crohn’s and then remove any orphans that don’t look right or are from plug ins that have been removed. A word of caution here, advanced to base cleaner is not perfect.

It’s not going to always be able to attribute things to the proper plugin like this delicious branes log file Chron that was still running on my site, even though I don’t have any delicious branes plug ins currently installed advanced DB cleaner attributed this log file to suppress rather than correctly identifying it as an orphan.

Now there are a lot of similar tools available in the WordPress landscape, but I was eager to check out advance database cleaner because of the stellar reputation that the developer has. Their reviews are off the charts and the support has been great. When I’ve interacted with him over email, the plug in really didn’t disappoint me at all either. With just a few clicks, I was able to clean up literally hundreds of extra files on my WordPress site.

This is something that you could do manually, but with tools like advanced database cleaner around, I don’t know why anyone would. I’m going to give advanced database cleaner pro a nine point four out of ten. It’s a super powerful plugin that makes clean up a breeze.

But remember to back up and remember, with great power comes great responsibility. That’s going to do it for this video.

Don’t forget to, like, subscribe and comment. It helps me as I attempt to defeat the YouTube algorithm. I’ll see you in the next review.