Optimise your WordPress database

Clear out post revisions, auto-drafts, spam and transients with the LiteSpeed Database Optimizer, and know which options are safe to run.

WordPress databases accumulate data that is never read again — old post revisions, abandoned drafts, expired transients, deleted comments. Clearing it reduces database size and speeds up queries. Applies to all shared and reseller hosting, which runs LiteSpeed.

The Database Optimizer is part of the LiteSpeed Cache plugin, so if the plugin is installed you already have it. See Install and enable LiteSpeed Cache.

Take a backup first. Every option here deletes data permanently, and there is no undo. See Download a backup of your account.

Open it

In the WordPress dashboard, go to LiteSpeed Cache → Manage, then the DB Optimizer tab.

Blue check marks mean an area is already clean. Red crosses mean there is something to remove.

What each option removes

Option	Removes	Safe to run
Post Revisions	Every saved revision, leaving the published version	Yes, if you do not need edit history
Auto Drafts	Automatic drafts WordPress saves while editing	Yes
Trashed Posts	Posts and pages in the Trash	Yes, once you have checked the Trash
Trashed Comments	Comments in the Trash	Yes
Spam Comments	Comments marked as spam	Yes
Trackbacks & Pingbacks	Trackback and pingback records	Yes
Expired Transients	Cached values whose lifetime has passed	Yes
All Transients	Every transient, expired or not	Yes, but see below
Optimize Tables	Nothing — reclaims space inside the tables	Yes
Clean CSS/JS Optimizer	Minified and combined CSS/JS data	Yes

Clean All runs everything except Optimize Tables and Clean CSS/JS Optimizer. Run those two separately.

The two worth thinking about

Post Revisions is usually the largest single saving. WordPress keeps every revision of every post forever, so a heavily edited site can hold ten times more revision rows than published content. The cost is that you lose the ability to roll a post back to an earlier draft.

To keep some history rather than none, cap revisions in wp-config.php instead of deleting them repeatedly:

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 5 );

All Transients deletes cached values that have not yet expired. Nothing breaks — WordPress regenerates them on demand — but the next few page loads are slower while it does, and some plugins store licence checks and API responses as transients. Prefer Expired Transients for routine cleaning.

Do this periodically, not constantly

Once a month is ample for most sites. Running it daily produces no measurable benefit and repeatedly rewrites the tables.

If the database is still large after cleaning, the size is in real content or in plugin tables the optimiser does not touch — commonly logging, analytics or form-submission plugins storing rows indefinitely. Check those plugins' own retention settings.

Verify

The DB Optimizer tab shows blue check marks where it showed red crosses.
The site loads normally, including a logged-out page and the dashboard.
Database size in cPanel has dropped, after running Optimize Tables — until then the rows are deleted but the space is not reclaimed.