This might be the least-exciting part of your report.  It’s a section that basically says ‘yup, things were cleaned up and optimized.’ Many people don’t realize that database optimization and clearing out post revisions are an integral part of your website’s overall health. This section will walk you through why these elements are very important to a site’s speed and performance.

Questions about anything you see in this report?  Contact us.

Optimization

Understanding Database Optimization

As the report states, as your MySQL database grows, it can slow down your website performance. Your first question from that sentence is probably what is my ‘MySQL database.’

Your MySQL database is essentially a large table of data that holds the information for the text on the page, how plugins and themes are configured, comments on your blog posts and more. Every post or page on your site, every plugin installed and every theme has its own section of your database and within each section are tables. Each of these tables get filled with temporary information that becomes unnecessary over time and needs to be cleaned out.

As these tables grow with size, the site has to look longer to find the ‘important’ information and slows down performance.

The amount of data cleaned isn’t very important (e.g. if one month it shows 25KB and the next month it shows 1MB) – but know that we are making sure that things are constantly cleaned up and running smooth.

Post Revisions & Why They Matter

Post revisions have been a part of WordPress since 2008 (version 2.6) and have grown in functionality and helpfulness. Think of post revisions as your undo button. If you save a change to a post, a revision is logged in the database. And you can roll back to that revision at a later time, if you decide to do so. Also, if your browser crashes in the middle of making a change but WordPress was able to auto-save before your screen went dark – you’re in luck.

That’s the good of revisions. The bad of revisions is if you are going back and changing a post or page often, the amount of revisions can be overwhelming for your site. We use a tool that periodically limits each post or page on your site to 5 revisions. That way – you’re likely able to roll far enough back to get the page looking like you had it before.

We also clean up any spam comments on your website as part of optimization maintenance.  Too many spam comments can slow down your site’s performance.

Still awake?  These necessary maintenance items are part of how we keep your website running!

** If you don’t see sections in your monthly report for database optimization and post revisions, don’t panic.  That just means your site is performing nicely and didn’t require additional optimization.