How to Use WordPress Advanced Database Cleanup Plugin – Tutorial

Forrest Pykes Apr 15, 2025

When it comes to improving the performance of our WordPress website, we focus primarily on aspects such as using a CDN , caching plugins , and faster web hosting .

However, there is another important aspect to improving your WordPress blog performance:

  • Clean your WordPress database.

New WordPress sites (2-3 months old) can take advantage of free database optimization plugins such as WP-Optimize or WP-DBManager.

However, for other WordPress-based websites that have been online for more than three months and have installed and uninstalled a large number of plugins, simple database optimization is not enough.

As part of my daily blogging activities, I try out a lot of plugins. However, uninstalling plugins does not completely delete all the tables in the WordPress database, and over time, the WordPress database is filled with many unused tables.

These unused tables are called orphan tables. They can severely degrade the performance of our WordPress blog. The solution is to find and delete these tables.

However, to someone with limited technical skills, this might sound like rocket science.

However, recently when I was working on optimizing my blog and thought of using the Clean Options plugin, I realized that the plugin had not been updated in the past 7 years.

It is not recommended to use any plugin that has not been updated recently when dealing with WordPress database. It can cause a lot of serious problems.

At this point, I started looking for other WordPress database optimizer plugins that could clean up such orphan tables. I found the Advanced Database Cleaner plugin. However, its free version does not support repairing orphan tables and tasks.

I was skeptical about their paid version but ultimately decided to purchase it since it was only $19 and one of my blogs was running very slowly. I had no choice but to deeply optimize my database to improve its performance.

Here, I will share the complete steps I used to optimize a bloated database for one of my WordPress blogs.

I recommend you to follow the same tutorial to clean your WordPress database.

So, let’s dive in and clean up our WordPress database and improve the overall performance of our WordPress blog!

How to delete orphan tables and tasks using Advanced Database Cleaner plugin

Important: Don't do database optimization if you don't do this...

Before you begin with this tutorial, you should back up your WordPress database. You can use the WP-DB Backup plugin to accomplish this, or choose another plugin from the list here .

If you’re using Kinsta hosting , just go to Site > Backup and click “ Backup Now ”.

How to Use WordPress Advanced Database Cleanup Plugin – Tutorial

Backups are very, very important because they ensure that we can always restore our blog if something goes wrong.

It happens sometimes. It's better to be safe than sorry.

So, now that you have a backup, let’s get started with the WordPress Advanced Database Cleaner plugin.

  • Get the Pro version of the plugin here . You can also use the free version for basic optimization by following this guide . However, the in-depth optimization features are only available with the Premium version.
  • You can try out one license to see if you like it, then use it to optimize all your sites. (I've been so happy with it that I've purchased five licenses for all my blogs.)
  • Install the plugin and activate it using the provided license key.

How to Use WordPress Advanced Database Cleanup Plugin – Tutorial

I'll go through it step by step so that you can start with basic optimizations and then move on to some advanced database cleanup.

General database cleanup

Click the "General Cleanup" tab and check the items that need to be cleaned. It is recommended to follow the screenshots.

Important: Make sure to uncheck "Drafts" and "Pending Comments."

How to Use WordPress Advanced Database Cleanup Plugin – Tutorial

Select Clean from the drop-down menu and click Apply.

In the pop-up window, click “Continue” and within seconds, this powerful database optimizer plugin will clean up your database.

Orphan Table

NOTE: We are skipping optimization for now as we will do a full database optimization at the end once we get everything done.

Go to the Tables tab to begin the process of finding orphaned tables.

Click Detect Orphan Tables . Depending on the size of your database, this may take several minutes.

How to Use WordPress Advanced Database Cleanup Plugin – Tutorial

Once the scan is complete, you will start to see orphan tables.

You can access them by clicking "Orphan Tables" at the top, or you can scroll down and view them in the "Belongs To" column.

Since I have cleaned up most of the orphan tables, here is a screenshot from another blog of mine:

How to Use WordPress Advanced Database Cleanup Plugin – Tutorial

Most of the table names are based on plugins you have used in the past, so you can easily decide if you can delete them.

If you can't decide, just copy the table name and search for it in Google Search.

If in doubt, don't delete it.

Once you have cleaned up the orphan tables, it is time to move on to orphan options and scheduled tasks.

Detect and remove orphan options

Click the Options tab, and then click Detect Orphan Options.

If you do this on an old blog, you may find a lot of orphaned options. For example, my four-year-old blog has 132 orphaned options. They were created by plugins I used in the early days but later deleted.

How to Use WordPress Advanced Database Cleanup Plugin – Tutorial

Clean up orphaned options that are no longer used.

Once done, click on the Scheduled Tasks tab. Repeat the same steps.

How to Use WordPress Advanced Database Cleanup Plugin – Tutorial

Once you are done, click on the Optimize tab and continue optimizing your database.

That's it!

After completing all of these actions, your database will be thoroughly cleaned and you should be able to notice a difference in the performance of your WordPress blog.

This plugin does not have an option for scheduled optimization, which I think is good since one should always backup the database before performing any such database altering activities.

If you prefer, you can simply deactivate the plugin when you’re not using it to save space. Typically, I recommend repeating these steps every two months. However, if you have a super active blog like ShoutMeLoud, you can repeat this process every two weeks or even monthly.

Cleaning up your WordPress blog database is an important part of overall WordPress optimization. Many experienced users tend to overlook this, which ends up causing a significant slowdown in WordPress backend speed or performance degradation over time.

Using WordPress Advanced Database Cleaner

Overall, WordPress Advanced Database Cleaner is one of the best database optimizer plugins I have seen in a long time.

A very cool thing about this plugin is that they offer lifetime free updates (most professional plugins only offer 1 year of free updates).

Here’s a handy chart comparing the features of the most popular database optimization WordPress plugins on the market:

How to Use WordPress Advanced Database Cleanup Plugin – Tutorial

Now it’s your turn to tell me: How often do you optimize and clean your WordPress database? What methods do you use? Have you used this plugin before? Let me know what you think in the comments below!

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