Clearing out the WordPress junk drawer

Every house has one. That drawer in the kitchen – full of dead batteries, old takeaway menus, a couple of screwdrivers and a mysterious key that definitely opened something once. Nothing gets thrown away, it all just goes in the drawer, and the drawer quietly gets fuller and fuller until it barely closes.

Your WordPress website has exactly the same drawer – the database. And just like the kitchen drawer, it’s almost certainly full of things that stopped being useful a long time ago.

What actually ends up in the drawer?

When you uninstall a plugin or change themes, WordPress doesn’t always tidy up after itself. Quite often, plugins leave behind tables, settings and rows of data that were created while they were active. The data sits there, invisible, dormant, taking up space and slowing everything down.

Did you try a few themes or plugins before settling on one? There’s a strong chance they all tossed their leftovers in the drawer!

WooCommerce has its own drawer!

It’s a brilliant platform, but it’s also one of the worst offenders for drawer-filling. Even if you uninstall it completely, WooCommerce can leave behind its own custom database tables, old visitor sessions, abandoned cart records, draft and failed orders, and a mountain of background task logs.

But it’s not just plugins and themes. WordPress itself also quietly hoards all sorts of clutter:

Post revisions

Every draft you save is kept by default, forever!

Trashed content

Deleted posts, pages and comments that were never properly emptied.

Expired transients

Post-it notes WordPress scribbles to itself, then forgets to throw away.

Orphaned metadata

Spare keys for locks that were thrown out years ago.

Why bother emptying the drawer?

It’s always good to keep things tidy, but clearing out the junk drawer also has more noticeable benefits:

A faster website

Less data to rummage through means quicker database queries, which means faster page loading for your visitors – and a snappier admin area for you.

Smaller, faster backups

Why back up two screwdrivers and a dead battery? A slim database is quicker to backup and restore.

Easier moves and migrations

If you ever switch hosting or redesign your site, a clean database makes the whole process smoother and less error-prone.

Easier troubleshooting

When something goes wrong, it’s much easier to find the problem in a tidy drawer than in one that barely closes.

Fewer surprises

Leftover data from removed plugins can cause conflicts. Clearing it out removes problems you didn’t even know you had.