Optimize the WordPress database
Optimize the WordPress database and recover the speed you used to have
Your WordPress stores every revision, every expired cache, and every leftover from plugins you uninstalled years ago. None of that gets deleted on its own. EHERO Cleaner shows it, measures it, and cleans it in one click — and it’s free.
Why the database grows on its own
A freshly installed WordPress site takes up just a few megabytes. The same site three years later can exceed a gigabyte without having published much at all. It’s not the content: it’s what accumulates around it.
Revisions
Every time you save a post, WordPress creates a full copy. An article edited twenty times means twenty copies of the entire text, indexed and taking up space. By default there is no limit: they are all saved, forever.
Expired transients
These are temporary caches that plugins store in the options table. They have an expiration date, but WordPress does not delete them when they expire: it just ignores them. A site with several active plugins accumulates thousands of dead rows that are read on every load.
Orphaned metadata
When you delete a post or product, its metadata should go with it. Often that doesn’t happen. And when you uninstall a plugin, almost none of them clean up what they left behind: their options, metadata, and tables remain there years later, pointing to content that no longer exists.
What WooCommerce adds
If you have a store, add expired customer sessions, download logs, the full Action Scheduler history —which in an active store can be hundreds of thousands of rows— and old order keys.
How to tell if it’s happening to you
You don’t need to be technical. These are the signs, from the most obvious to the most silent:
- The WordPress dashboard takes a long time to load even though the public site works fine. It’s the clearest sign: the admin queries the database without cache.
- Backups take longer and longer and occupy more space than your content justifies.
- The internal search slows down or returns strange results from deleted content.
- Your hosting warns you about database usage or CPU consumption in queries.
The EHERO Cleaner dashboard gives you the exact data as soon as you install it: the real database size and how many items there are of each type, before touching anything.
What can be deleted safely and what cannot
This is the important part, and the reason many people never clean up: the fear of breaking something. Let’s break it down.
✅ Safe, always
Expired transients, automatic drafts, comments marked as spam, posts already in the trash, and metadata pointing to non-existent content. None of this is part of your site: it’s either already discarded or already broken.
⚠️ Use judgment
All transients —the active ones will regenerate, but the first load will be a bit slower— and old revisions, where it’s better to decide how many to keep per post instead of deleting them all.
🚫 Never
Your published content, orders, customers, and active plugin data. EHERO Cleaner does not touch any of this: there is no tool that allows it, not even by mistake.
Each tool shows its risk level on the card itself, tells you how many items it will affect before running, and asks for confirmation for anything destructive. And the whole process is local: nothing is sent to any external server.
The tools, one by one
More than twenty-five, grouped by what they solve. All included, none reserved for a paid edition.
Cache and transients
Expired transients, all transients, and the oEmbed cache, which stores a copy of every embedded video or tweet.
Discarded content
Old revisions while keeping the ones you choose, automatic drafts, posts in the trash, and forgotten edit locks.
Comments
Spam, comments in the trash, and pingbacks and trackbacks, which on ninety percent of websites are pure noise.
Orphaned metadata
From posts, comments, terms, and users. Plus broken term relationships and duplicate metadata.
WooCommerce
Expired sessions, download logs, and the Action Scheduler history —completed, failed, canceled, and their logs— with HPOS compatibility.
Maintenance
Table optimization, user session tokens, feed cache, and the detector for leftovers from plugins you already uninstalled.
Scheduled cleaning: set it and forget it
Cleaning once is fine; the problem comes back in three months. That’s why scheduled cleaning is what really changes things: choose a frequency —twice a day, daily, or weekly— and mark which tools you want to run automatically.
The sensible thing is to schedule only the ones marked as safe and run the rest manually when needed. That way, maintenance becomes something that happens without anyone having to remember it.
How to install it
- From your WordPress
Plugins → Add New → search for “EHERO Cleaner” → Install → Activate. This is the recommended way because updates arrive automatically.
- Look at the numbers before touching anything
The dashboard tells you the database size and how many items there are of each type. Without running anything yet.
- Start with the safe ones
Run all the tools marked as safe at once. That’s where most of the bulk is, and there’s no risk.
- Schedule maintenance
Leave weekly cleaning enabled with the safe tools and forget about it.
Compatibility
- WordPress 6.2+
- PHP 7.4+
- WooCommerce
- HPOS
- Action Scheduler
- Multisite
- Any hosting
- No external dependencies
- GPLv2
It works the same on a site without a store: WooCommerce tools only appear if WooCommerce is active.
Frequently asked questions
Is it really free? What’s the catch?
There is no catch. It’s GPLv2, there is no license check, and it has all the features. We keep it because people who install it and find it useful end up seeing us as a trustworthy place to buy a paid plugin. That’s the whole model.
Can I lose content?
No, if you stick to what the tool marks as safe: that only touches data that is already discarded, already expired, or structurally broken. Even so, the golden rule with any database cleanup is to have a recent backup. Make one.
How much will I recover?
It depends on how old the site is and how many plugins you’ve tried. On three- or four-year-old sites with several installed and uninstalled plugins, it’s common to remove between 20% and 60% of the database size. The dashboard tells you before and after.
Is it useful if I don’t have a store?
Yes. Revisions, transients, and orphaned metadata are accumulated by any WordPress site. The WooCommerce tools simply won’t appear.
And if I uninstall a plugin, does it leave leftovers?
Most do, and that’s why the uninstalled plugin metadata detector exists: it shows you which metadata prefixes are still in your database, grouped by the plugin that created them, so you can decide.
How often should I clean?
Weekly for the safe items is more than enough. What makes no sense is cleaning manually every six months: the junk comes back, and between cleanups the site runs slowly.
If this helped, also check this out
- Full details of EHERO Cleaner — the breakdown of the more than 25 tools and the requirements.
- EHERO Smart Search — when what’s slow is not the database but the store search.
- All plugins for WooCommerce — the rest of the catalog, which is paid.
Optimizing the WordPress database should not cost money
More than twenty-five tools, scheduled cleaning, and the plugin leftovers detector. No license, no domain limit, and no stripped-down version.