How to clean up your database

WordPress never throws anything away. Every draft you saved becomes a revision, every spam comment sits in a table, every expired transient stays until something clears it. None of it is served to visitors, but all of it makes queries slower and backups bigger. This panel shows exactly what has accumulated and lets you remove the parts you choose.

💡 Set expectations: this is housekeeping, not tuning. A smaller wp_posts and wp_postmeta does make queries cheaper, but the gain is modest next to caching — Page Cache and Object Cache are where the large wins are. Clean the database because a lean one is easier to back up and reason about, not as a substitute for caching.

Where to find it

1. In your WordPress admin, click xSpeed Cache in the left menu.
2. In the xSpeed Cache sidebar, open the Tools group.
3. Click the Database card.

Shortcut: open wp-admin/admin.php?page=xspeed#/tools/database directly.

✅ This panel is part of xSpeed Cache (Free).

1. Database bloat — the scan result, with Rescan.
2. Actions — Optimize tables and Clean selected.

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Settings at a glance

Setting	Default	What it does
Auto-Cleanup Schedule	Manual	How often cleanup runs by itself.
Auto-Cleanup Types	Empty	Which categories the schedule cleans.
Limit Post Revisions	Off	Cap how many revisions WordPress keeps per post from now on.
Revisions to Keep	5	The cap, when limiting is on. Range 0–500; 0 turns revisions off entirely.

The scan and the Clean selected / Optimize tables buttons are actions rather than settings — nothing is removed until you press one.

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How it works

Opening the panel runs a scan and reports what it found, broken down by category with a row count for each. Nothing is deleted by scanning. You tick the categories you want gone and press Clean selected.

The header gives you the shape of the problem at a glance — for example “62 rows across 2 categories”, meaning only two of the eight categories actually contain anything. Categories with a zero count are greyed out, so you can see immediately where the weight is.

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The eight categories

Category	What it is	Safe to clean?
Post Revisions	Every saved draft state of every post	Yes, though you lose the ability to roll back
Auto-Drafts (older than 7 days)	Abandoned “new post” stubs	Yes
Trashed Posts	Posts in the trash	Yes — but they’re gone for good
Spam Comments	Comments marked spam	Yes
Trashed Comments	Comments in the trash	Yes
Expired Transients	Cached values past their expiry	Yes — always safe
Orphan Post Meta	Metadata whose post no longer exists	Yes
Orphan Comment Meta	Metadata whose comment no longer exists	Yes

Expired transients and orphan meta are pure waste — the data they belong to is already gone or already invalid. Clean those without hesitation.

Post revisions are the judgement call, and usually the biggest number. On this site they’re 42 of the 62 rows found. Revisions are how you undo a bad edit, so deleting them trades recoverability for size. Fine on a site whose content is settled; less so mid-project.

💡 Cleaning removes the revisions you already have; capping stops them coming back. Limit Post Revisions below does the capping, so you no longer need to edit wp-config.php for it. Clean the backlog here, then set a limit and leave it.

Trashed posts and comments are permanent deletions. The trash is WordPress’s undo, and cleaning it empties that. Check the trash before ticking those boxes.

⚠️ Cleaning cannot be undone. There is no confirmation beyond your own selection, and no restore afterwards. If you’ve never done this on a production site, take a database backup first — this is exactly the operation backups exist for.

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Optimize tables

Separate from cleaning, and much less dramatic. Deleting rows leaves gaps in MySQL’s storage; Optimize tables reclaims that space and rebuilds indexes.

Run it after a cleanup — that’s when there’s fragmentation to reclaim. Running it on its own achieves little.

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Automating it

1. Auto-Cleanup Schedule — how often cleanup runs by itself.
2. Auto-Cleanup Types — which categories the schedule includes.
3. Limit Post Revisions — cap what WordPress keeps from now on.
4. Revisions to Keep — the cap itself.

Auto-Cleanup Schedule defaults to Manual, meaning cleanup only ever runs when you press the button. The alternatives are Hourly, Daily, and Weekly.

Auto-Cleanup Types is empty by default, and this is the part worth understanding: the panel spells out that leaving it empty keeps auto-cleanup disabled even if a schedule is set.

That’s a deliberate safety. Two separate settings must both be configured before anything is deleted automatically — picking a schedule alone does nothing. It prevents the failure where you set “Daily” while exploring and quietly start losing revisions every night.

For a sensible automatic setup: schedule Weekly, and include only Expired Transients, Spam Comments, and the two Orphan Meta types. Those regenerate or are already worthless. Leave revisions and trashed content to manual review.

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Capping revisions instead of cleaning them repeatedly

Cleaning is retrospective: it removes the revisions that have already piled up. Limit Post Revisions is the other half — it caps how many WordPress keeps for each post from now on, so the backlog doesn’t rebuild itself.

Revisions to Keep defaults to 5 and accepts 0 to 500. Setting it to 0 turns revisions off completely, which also removes your ability to roll back an edit — sensible on a settled brochure site, risky on one people are actively writing.

Older revisions are trimmed the next time each post is saved, not immediately. So the setting stops future growth, and cleaning Post Revisions above is still how you clear what exists today.

⚠️ If WP_POST_REVISIONS is defined in wp-config.php, it wins. The panel says so and names the value it found, because a limit set here would silently do nothing. Remove that definition to manage the limit from this panel instead.

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Related

• How to enable Redis or Memcached
• How to check your site health
• How to read the activity log