This blog post is contributed by a guest blogger, Sujain Thomas. Sujain Thomas is a website developer and she also has years of experience in data management. She has written extensively on how database management is necessary for improving a website’s performance.
Are you worried about the loading time of your website? Have you been hearing complaints that it takes too long for the site to load, and some of the pictures do not load even after waiting for several minutes? Then, surely there is a need for you to look into the performance of your website. The chances are that the bounce rate on your site is quite high since people do not like waiting around for too long. In fact, according to studies, people abandon a website in favor of another if it takes more than a few seconds to load.
Why is it essential to monitor the load time of your website?
Yes, just a few more seconds can have a significant impact on the search engine optimization and popularity of your website. It would not be wrong to say that for each second more your site takes to load, the abandon rate on your page rises. Kissmetrics states about 47% of consumers expect a website to load within two seconds or less. Moreover, 40% of consumers abandon a web page that requires over three seconds to load. Today’s websites are responsive and attempt to create a seamless experience for visitors across devices. Did you know that 73% of mobile internet users have said that they have encountered a web page that was too slow in loading? Are you sure, yours is not one of them?
You must be wondering if there is an easy way to shave a few seconds off the load time of your website. In case you are using WordPress for your site, and it has been running for only a few months, you are probably in luck. Cleaning up your website’s database might be the only thing you need to do to boost the load time of your site.
Why does your WordPress database require cleaning?
You are probably aware of the fact that WordPress uses PHP and MySQL PHP is a programming language is used for fetching and displaying the information that is stored in a MySQL database. As you are always making changes to your website, updating and editing data and design, there are probably a lot of elements in the back-end that you required at one point of time but do not anymore. These unnecessary items can slow your website, adversely affecting the load time. Clean up of every aspect starting from posts, comments, meta titles and descriptions, options, terms may be required to optimize your database.
Why must you backup your database?
Since your database has all the information that is required to run your website, experts from RemoteDBA.com suggest backing up your database before the cleanup. In case, you mistakenly delete something that you were not supposed to, you can end up the appearance and performance of your website. Thankfully, with the right plugin, taking your website’s backup is not a very difficult task. You must read up on WordPress plugins a bit to find out which ones suit your requirement the most.
Now that you know how the maintenance of your database is vital for the correct functioning of your website, you must chalk out a plan for database clean up from time to time. Assess the performance your website and figure out when is the time that you will be okay with the minimum bit of downtime. Since you are using WordPress, you can be sure that the downtime will be minimum.
