A list of the best WordPress database optimization plugins to help speed up your WordPress site.
Update: this article is more than 5 years old now.
I shouldn't need to explain that a healthy well-optimized database is great for your website. A good database optimization plugin can take entire megabytes of accumulated clutter out of a bloated and unoptimized database.
Top Pick: WP Clean Up
In all testing WP Clean Up beat the other plugins by a mile.
99% of plugins just do the standard MySQL database optimization function.
Unlike the competition WP Clean Up digs deep into the clutter of a typical WordPress database, (optionally) removing:
- Revisions
- Drafts
- Auto Drafts
- Moderated Comments
- Spam Comments
- Trash Comments
- Orphan Post meta data
- Orphan Comment meta data
- Orphan Relationships
- Dashboard Transient Feed data
Intelligent, or even better *ruthless* use of the above removal tools - combined with the standard database optimization tool will reduce even a well optimized database, and will clean literally 60-80% of redundant data out the typical previously unoptimized database.
WP Database Optimizer
Not as good as WP Clean Up, but does a reasonable job at optimizing your database.
The strength of this plugin is that it is set up out of the box to run automatically at a set period. This means you can set it to optimize your database once a day for example.
WP-DBManager
As well as a database optimization tool WP-DBManager is a fully featured database management plugin.
The plugin includes functions that allow you to repair, backup, restore, drop/delete tables and run selected queries against the database.
Runners Up
Other basic WordPress database optimization plugins of note: