Is your website running slowly? If you’ve had a WordPress site for a few years, it could be the MySQL database—the silent killer of WordPress performance. The database can be the biggest drain on WordPress speed and stability but for many of us, it’s the most intimidating part to address, which can leave sites bloated, expensive, and ready to crash under high traffic.
But it’s actually not that scary. Using WordPress plugins and phpMyAdmin, we’ll build the skills to diagnose database issues, go over some common problems and a few weird edge cases from abandoned plugin data to blog imports gone wrong, and learn how to safely fix and maintain the database for top performance.