I’ve noticed my wordpress site has started to slow down a bit. I thought it was because of the heavy web template I’m using and the large amount of widgets and plugins I’ve added but I wanted to do everything possible to speed up the website (afterall the last thing a webhost wants is a slow webpage).

Turns out the folks over at weblogtoolscollection.com has a recommendation that has resulted in an excellent wordpress performance improvement tip, optimize your mysql tables.

To perform this tip you’ll need to first access your mysql database using phpmyadmin, a free web based tool for managing MySQL that almost every webhost supports.  Once logged into phpmyadmin select your database so that all your tables are displayed as shown below:

 

untitled picture

You’ll then want to select the ‘check all’ option and from the drop down box shown below select “Optimize” 

untitled picture

This will proceed to optimize your tables for you. Once completed access your weblog and see for yourself if there’s a decent improvement. Now before doing this it’s wise to create a backup of your database. I use a wordpress database backup plugin called wp-db-backup and have it create a database backup and email it to me before making any changes to my database (so I can roll back easily).

I hope you find this tidbit useful and if you have a better way of optimizing the databases please feel free to leave a comment.