When you uninstall a plugin/theme on wordpress, either manual or automatic, many times it doesn’t get removed completely.
Some support files of that plugin/theme/app still left in your wordpress MySQL database. They don’t serve any purpose as their parent application (plugin/theme) is uninstalled.
As your site gets older, you may install and uninstall many plugins and their corresponding orphan options and tables will be left in the database and the database will be full of garbage that slow down your site performance as the server takes long time to find and retrieve the data from that database.
So, you have to cleanup your wordpress database by deleting those unnecessary options and tables data. Doing it manually is a difficult and time taking task. There are plugins available on wordpress which detects and clean the orphan options, tables and unnecessary files on your wordpress database.
In this article, i show you a simple wordpress plugin that finds the orphan options,tables and unused data on your site.
Note: Make sure orphan files are not being used by any other plugin/theme/any program before you delete them.To be on safe side, always take backup of your database before you do any changes.
I used clean options plugin on my sites, but that is very old and it was updated long ago. I don’t recommend to use that plugin from your site security point of view. Recently, i have installed WP DB Cleaner plugin on my site and it is the best plugin to cleanup and optimize your wordpress database. I tried other plugins but i observed that they slowed down my site.
Features of WP DB Cleaner
- Removes unused data
- Detects and clean options
- Detects and clean tables
- Optimizes the database
- Scheduled cleanup and optimize of database
Screenshot of WP DB Cleaner (Advanced Database Cleaner) wordpress plugin
