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What Does WP-Optimize Database Optimization Plugin
The first remarkable aspect of the WP-Optimize Database Optimization Plugin is its ability to cleanse your database. Over time, your website accumulates unnecessary data, including spam comments, redundant post revisions, and trashed content. This clutter can slow down your website, hindering its performance.
Luckily, the WP-Optimize plugin removes such data, helping your website run more efficiently. Don’t worry if you are unfamiliar with terms like transient options or database overhead. The plugin does all the hard work, optimizing your website behind the scenes.
Compress Images with the WP-Optimize Plugin
The WP-Optimize Database Optimization Plugin is not only limited to cleaning up your database but also extends its prowess to image compression. The plugin compresses your WordPress media library images using lossless or lossy compression. The result is a reduction in the storage space consumed by your images, ultimately boosting your website’s loading speed. With a single click, you can also bulk compress images, a convenient feature with numerous images.
Speeding Up Your Website with Page Caching
Page caching is one of the critical features of the WP-Optimize Database Optimization Plugin. In simple terms, page caching creates static versions of your website’s pages, which are then presented to your visitors. This function significantly increases your site’s loading speed while reducing the strain on your server.
Installing WP-Optimize Database Optimization WordPress Plugin
You can install the plugin using our WordPress Plugin Installation Guide article of our Complete SEO Guide Box.
Search for: WP-Optimize – Cache, Clean, Compress By David Anderson, Ruhani Rabin, Team Updraft
Setting Up and Using WP-Optimize Database Optimization Plugin
WP-Optimize is not just a Database Optimization Plugin. However, we will use it only for that. For Image optimization, we will use offline compression; for page caching, we will use the Clearfy Cache WordPress plugin.
Before optimizing the database, make sure you back up everything. If you already have the UpdraftPlus backup plugin installed, WP-Optimize will use it to back up the database.
On the left side menu bar, click on [WP-Optimize].
By default, you will be on the [Database] tab on the top menu and the [Optimizations] tab on the secondary.
Most options remove something from the database, making it lighter and more responsive.
Execute each option separately and read carefully what it does.
If you don’t understand what an option does, don’t do it.
You can set scheduled optimizations, but we do not recommend that. Since it can easily break the database, you will not know about it.
WP-Optimize Automatic Lines in robots.txt
The file “robots.txt” restricts your website’s directories for bot crawlers to access. Suppose you have this file in your WordPress installation directory. In that case, WP-Optimize will automatically add to the content of the “robots.txt” file these lines:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content/uploads/wpo-plugins-tables-list.jsonLines breakdown:
User-agent: *
This line targets all web crawlers. The “*” wildcard means “any user agent,” so the rule applies to all bots, regardless of their name or purpose.
Disallow: /wp-content/uploads/wpo-plugins-tables-list.json
This line tells the bots not to access or crawl the file located at “/wp-content/uploads/wpo-plugins-tables-list.json” on the website. The file is a JSON file that is related to WP-Optimize.
Taken together, these lines instruct all web crawlers not to access or index the specified WP-Optimize Database Optimization Plugin’s JSON file on the website.
If you think you don’t need these lines, the developers say you can’t remove them manually.
So, you will need to add several lines to the “functions.php” file of your Child Theme:
add_action('after_setup_theme', 'ab123_remove_robots_txt_entry');
function ab123_remove_robots_txt_entry() {
if (function_exists('WP_Optimize')) {
remove_filter('robots_txt', array(WP_Optimize(), 'robots_txt'), 99, 1);
}
}We will cover the Child Theme creation later in our Complete SEO Guide Box, but we don’t think removing these lines is necessary. So, you can leave them as is.
What is wpo-plugins-tables-list.json file?
The file “wpo-plugins-tables-list.json” is responsible for correlating the WordPress database names of the plugins and plugin names from “wordpress.org.” A user was worried about the wpo-plugins-tables-list.json file possessing security risk.
This file has no private information besides WP-Optimize being installed on your site. The file has only the list of all the plugin names from “wordpress.org” and the table names that each plugin created in the database (for correlation). So when you use WP-Optimize, it will show you the plugin’s name against each table name if it relates to a plugin. Then, WP-Optimize checks what plugins are currently installed on your WordPress installation. If a plugin doesn’t exist anymore, it tells you that. So, you may delete this unused table since the plugin of this table is no longer relevant, thus making your database lighter and more responsive.
If you think that this might be an issue, there are two options:
1. You can remove the WP-Optimize plugin after each time you optimize the database and install it again before you want to optimize it again.
2. You can turn off the creation of the “wpo-plugins-tables-list.json” file with code you will need to add to the “functions.php” file of your Child Theme. We will cover the creation of both later in our Complete SEO Guide Box. The code:
add_filter( 'wpo_update_plugin_json', '__return_false' );The problem is that when you turn off this file, you will not know which tables belong to which plugin. So, in this case, the first approach is more efficient.
If you find any mistakes or have ideas for improvement, please follow the email on the Contact page.