I’ve been struggling with the speed of my WordPress blogs, both on my personal blog and here.  My web host for these two domains is notorious for bad MySQL implementations, but I knew that wasn’t my whole problem.  I tried to get WP Super Cache to solve some of these problems, but that didn’t quite do what I thought it should have.

I’ve been looking for ideas and found a little tweak here and a little tweak there but nothing really helped.   Tonight I was looking again and found this and I’m like, “You’ve got to be kidding me!”   It made perfect sense — I just never thought about it before.  To summarize the steps:

1. Log into PhpMySqlAdmin.
2. Click on the database name on the left side.
3. On the right hand side,  your tables will be listed. Scroll all the way down and click on the  “Check all” link.
4. Make sure all database tables are checked and then from the dropdown next to it, carefully select “Optimize table”.
5. Click the “Go” button

You can issue the optimize command from a MySQL prompt as well, but most web hosts will only give you PhpMySqlAdmin.

Having to do this makes perfect sense.  You’ve created your tables,  put data in them, and the WordPress has been doing query after query on them.  So now you have a pattern of usage and so MySQL could use that information to query the data more effectively.  And that is what optimize is for, especially since WordPress is fully of VARCHAR and TEXT columns.

So, if your WordPress blog is loading slow, you really try running optimize on the tables.