Advanced Database Cleaner

Your database keeps the leftovers of everything you once tried

A five year old site has seen forty plugins come and go. They were tried, they did not convince, they were uninstalled. What almost none of them took with them was their belongings: loose options still loading on every visit, their own tables nobody looks at again, scheduled tasks still waking up hourly to run a function that no longer exists.

That is the underlying problem and it is not about space, which is cheap. It is that this attic gets read on every page load, and above all that nobody dares clean it because nobody knows whose each thing was. Faced with an option called wpseo_titles, anyone can tell. Faced with sixty rows of cryptic names, the sensible decision ends up being to touch nothing.

What the official Advanced Database Cleaner licence covers

The Pro features activated on your site, the developer's updates while the licence is current and their support. The GPLClub team does the activation on your domain.

What it does

• Cleans what is surplus: revisions, auto-drafts, trash, spam comments, duplicated or orphaned metadata and expired transients.
• Identifies the owner of each leftover, which is the feature genuinely separating the Pro version: it says which plugin left that table, that option or that scheduled task, and whether that plugin is still installed.
• Tidies scheduled tasks, including the ones pointing at actions that no longer exist.
• Optimises and repairs tables, with conversion to InnoDB.
• Shows how the database grows with per-table charts, which is how you spot the plugin swelling out of control.
• Automates the cleaning with rules along the lines of "keep only the last X revisions".

When it pays

On sites with years and many hands. The longer the history of plugins tried, the bigger the attic and the less anybody knows about it.

If you maintain other people's sites, where you did not write the history and knowing who left each thing is the difference between cleaning and breaking.

And the warning the maker itself puts up front, so we repeat it: back up the database before cleaning. It is not a manual's recommendation, it is the condition for being able to go back. If you have not solved that part yet, look at the WPVivid licence. And to try the tool before deciding, members have Advanced Database Cleaner PRO in the catalogue.

About licensing and the GPL

The code is distributed under the GPL licence and its use is free. Updates, support and activation against the developer's servers are separate services contracted with them. They are not the same thing, and buying one is not buying the other.