your blog grows bigger and bigger your wordpress database expands accordingly and there is a whole lot of junk that over look but has a negative effect on your blog. Useless posts and options tables can make your wordpress junky and can also decrease the performance of your blog.

I have got some nice tips to share with my readers that shall help them increase their wordpress performance and make their blog fast and bug free.

Tips To Optimize Your Wordpress Blog

These tips shall help wordpress users optimize their blog:

Clean Orphaned Options

From past some months I have been experimenting with a lot of plugins for my blog. I have experimented over 50 plugins of which I am currently using only 15 of them. A thing to notice is that when you activate a plugin it saves some data in Options table of your wordpress database but when you deactivate it it does not remove those options and they are said to be Orphaned. Now the question is how to know which options are orphaned and how to remove them easily without messing up the database.

I got my some days ago at Freakitude where I got introduced to this new wordpress plugin called Clean Options. The plugin does the job for you in terms of cleaning your database. It searches the Options Table for orphaned data that was used by plugins that you do not currently use and allows them to remove it on the go. This helps you optimize your wordpress data and also your options table.

Remove Dormant Categories

It has happened with me but it does not mean that happens with all bloggers. But if you see the categories on my blog now you would notice that the number of categories has decreased.

This is because I just tweaked my database and removed all of the dormant categories or categories that I considered were not active or did not suit my blog as basically my blog is a Technology Blog.

If you feel that any category you have made does not suit the content of your blog then it is good if you just remove it. Having more categories just puts an extra amount of load on your wordpress database and if the categories do not match your blog content they make your blog look unprofessional.

Clean Irrelevant Comments/Trackbacks

If you are a new blogger you certainly do not know what is spam and what is a real comment unless you have Akismet installed. In this case you tend to approve all comments to your posts without realizing that the comments are actually spam.

This happened with me too but now that I have realized what is the difference between real comments and bogus comments I have started refining my old comments.

Bogus Trackbakcs fall in a similar category to spam and should be removed at once too. Bogus trackbacks refer to the back links that you receive from web sites or blogs that are run through automated softwares. One such software is named Auto-Blogging and is made by Elliottback.

Remove Outdated Blog Posts

Now one thing I would like to make clear here is that ‘removing outdated posts’ does not mean at all that you should start deleting posts that are x years old or not being visited anymore.

Removing Outdated Posts actually refers to as removing those posts which contain outdated or obsolete data and are no longer of any use to you or your readers. These posts may contain reviews of other sites or products which no longer exist or posts which contains broken links that redirect your users to any 404 page.

However if you think that your database is too much over crowded with old posts you can use the prune database plugin to remove posts and comments that are xx days old.

This will not only ensure that your blog gains a good repute in the blogosphere rather it will also keep your database free of broken/bad links.

Cleane Your Blog Files

Installing new attractive plugins and adding new features to your blog is a very common habit of bloggers all around the globe. The habit makes us add different code snippets e.g. html codes javascript codes and php codes in our wordpress files. These codes are for the time being and when deactivating plugins we forget to remove these codes.

These codes make our blog heavy for a normal user. The page usually takes a long time to load because the server first checks if the code is alive or not and when it finds that the specific requested code is deactivated the page loads very slow or in most cases will break or won’t load at all.

header.php sidebar.php index.php single.php and page.php are the 5 basic wordpress files in your theme folder which you must check and scan to look for function calls that are no longer active and if you find any dormant code snippets just remove them at once.