Pimpin’ My WordPress Part 6 – Optimize those tables for faster page loads

I’ve noticed my wordpress site has started to slow down a bit. I thought it was because of the heavy web template I’m using and the large amount of widgets and plugins I’ve added but I wanted to do everything possible to speed up the website (afterall the last thing a webhost wants is a slow webpage).

Turns out the folks over at weblogtoolscollection.com has a recommendation that has resulted in an excellent wordpress performance improvement tip, optimize your mysql tables.

To perform this tip you’ll need to first access your mysql database using phpmyadmin, a free web based tool for managing MySQL that almost every webhost supports.  Once logged into phpmyadmin select your database so that all your tables are displayed as shown below:

 

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You’ll then want to select the ‘check all’ option and from the drop down box shown below select “Optimize” 

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This will proceed to optimize your tables for you. Once completed access your weblog and see for yourself if there’s a decent improvement. Now before doing this it’s wise to create a backup of your database. I use a wordpress database backup plugin called wp-db-backup and have it create a database backup and email it to me before making any changes to my database (so I can roll back easily).

I hope you find this tidbit useful and if you have a better way of optimizing the databases please feel free to leave a comment.

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