[This post is part of the WordPress Guide for Beginners – Step by Step Tutorials]

Whenever you delete a plugin or theme, it’s not completely deleted from your database. The table and data of the plugin/theme can still be on your WordPress database. When some plugins delete their data from database, other can keep their data in case you re-install the plugin.

If you’ve been using WordPress for a while, then there is a chance that you have some unnecessary tables and data on your database. This unnecessary things may hurt your site performance. If you are on shared hosting, then you may face slow WordPress issue for heavy database.

So it’s very important to clean and optimize WordPress database properly. Like everything you can do it by using a WordPress plugin. Here’s how to do it.

Recommended Reading: How to Backup Your WordPress Blog to Dropbox [Automatically]

How to Manage WordPress Database

WP-DBManager is the plugin that will help you to optimize and manage your database. This plugin will also help you to repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries.

Just follow this simple steps to keep your database clean and optimized.

1. At first, Install and activate the WP-DBManager plugin. You will have a new database options on your WordPress dashboard.

2. Before doing anything else, I would like to suggest you to perform a backup of your WordPress Dashboard. You can do it by using this plugin. Just click on the ‘Backup DB’ under Database option.

To download your database, click on the ‘Manage Backup DB’ under database.

3. Now time to optimize your database. Click on ‘Optimize DB’ to optimize the database. Your Database should be optimized once every month.

2. To clean your database, select Empty/Drop Tables. Here you’ll find two options – empty or delete a table. If you find any table for any plugin/theme that you are not using, select the drop radio button.

Always take a backup before doing something like that and do only if you are aware of what you are doing. Otherwise, take help from an expert.

Hope it helps. If you find this post useful, don’t forget to share it on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.