Trim your database size and speed up access time making your website faster by optimising your website (eg WordPress blog) database.

Use phpMyAdmin to optimise tables in your blog database

Not the catchiest title ever, but it does what it says on the tin.
Please note we strongly advise to make a backup before attempting any alterations to your database. We give no warranty with this information.

Find phpMyAdmin

Fire up your website management console (eg Plesk, cPanel) and choose the database management link.


Then you may have to keep chasing the links to get to phpMyAdmin, in Plesk 9 I have this:

This then, finally, gives me a new phpMyAdmin window – make sure you’ve got the right database selected, eg for my blog I use “dbname-wp”.

Choose your tables and optimise

Now click the database name in the left frame (or alternatively click “databases” in the left column and then choose the database you wish to optimise). This will give you a table of all the tables in this database note the total size – select the tables you wish to optimise (eg use the “check all” link) and then use the “with selected:” dropdown to select “optimise table”.

You’re done. You should get a results page showing the table optimisations have been performed. Going back to the list of all tables you should see the size has decreased confirming the process has been successful.