WordPress Database Cleanup in 2021

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eCommerce Maintenance

Hi friends, I am Stefan, Media PRO Web Design lead programmer/developer. I have been managing (and also mismanaging) MY SQL databases for almost 22 years now. MySQL was the second programming language I learned and to this day it is still one of my favourites.

In all that time of wrangling databases, one thing has remained constant, you have to actively manage your database and at times, that means cleanup and maintenance. WordPress databases are no different.

Why you must Maintain your WordPress Database?

One of the most important reasons to do WordPress database cleanup is because your database is the second slowest part of your entire system. The only thing slower is the file system itself. So making sure that your database is operating at optimal speed is important not only to your site health but to your search engine rankings. Most of the major search engines use page speed as a factor in ranking a page. For optimum WordPress performance, you want to keep the database clean. Cleaning your WordPress database is part of an overall process of WordPress performance tuning.

The vast majority of WordPress installs use a MySQL (or MariaDB) Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). That is what we will focus on in this article. Even so, most of the advice will apply to whatever data store you are using for your WordPress database.

Steps to Take for an optimal WordPress Database Cleanup

Back-Up your SQL First

Before you embark on this journey, make sure you create a fresh backup. Yes, you should have nightly backups from the past 30 days nearby but things may have changed since your backup. You want to make sure that if you mess something up, you can easily restore things to the point where you started.

If your hosting partner offers an on-demand backup system as Irish Hosting does, make one now. If not, before you go any further, install a plugin that will allow you to create and restore database backups. There are many places online where you can get such plugins.

After you make your backup, go ahead and restore it so you can see what it’s like before you get in an emergency situation. Remember, if you have an untested backup system, you don’t have disaster recovery, you have hopes and wishes.

Leftover tables in the WordPress Database

Now that you’ve got your backup system ready, this first item is one that you may want to bring a developer in on. I’ma  big fan of bringing in professional help when I’m in over my head and this task may put a lot of people in over their heads.

If your site has been around a while, the chances are good that you have installed and uninstalled a lot of plugins. My personal site has been running WordPress since 2005. Many plugins, especially the older ones, did not clean up after themselves. This means that during install, they may have created tables in your database that they did not delete when you uninstalled them. Look at your list of tables – if you don’t know how, you don’t need to be doing this without help – and try and identify any that are no longer in use. Remove those tables from your database.

Once you’ve removed them, test EVERYTHING. It is these kinds of operations that make me recommend having a staging environment up and running and test these things in staging first. Still, if you have your backup, you should be good to go.

I looked at the database for my personal site a year or so ago. There are over 500 tables in it. The standard WordPress install has around 40. I really need to take the time to clean things up myself.

There are plugins that will help you with this task if you do not have a developer available. One of them is mentioned below, WP-Optimize.

Don’t be alarmed if when you try and remove a table it fails. The database user that your WordPress install runs under may not – probably SHOULD NOT – have table delete privileges. Still, you can show this list to your developer and they will know how to safely remove these tables.

Revisions

Next up, let’s talk about Post revisions. As you are working on a Post or Page, WordPress is constantly saving it in the background. To allow you to go back and restore one of these versions at a later date, each revision is stored as a separate record in the posts database. Once you have finished editing your Post and pushed it live, these revisions serve no purpose.

If you have a developer on staff, they can easily delete these records from the table without having to install any plugins. If you don’t have a developer, or you want to make a change that will keep this problem solved for you, check out WP Revisions Control. This simple plugin will allow you to set how many revisions to keep and it will keep your database clean for you, automatically.

Draft Posts

Another source of “cruft” in your database is old posts that you started but never released. Again, using my personal site as an example, I looked one time and I had well over 50 posts in DRAFT status. This means not only did I have 50 records in my database I didn’t need but I also had revisions for each of them just hanging around. Get rid of those old posts that you are never going to release.

Empty the Trash

As an administrator of a WordPress installation, you have deleted old posts, pages, and other things. WordPress doesn’t actually remove these old entries from your system, it moves them into “the trash”. (From a technical perspective it changes the status of these items.)

The Trash is great if you need to go back and retrieve something later on but after a certain amount of time, you can be fairly confident that you aren’t going to need what you trashed. So empty “The Trash”. When you do this, you actually delete the items that WordPress has marked as trash. This gets them out of your database and keeps them from hanging around and cluttering things up.

Things Not To Worry About

There is a lot of advice on what you should do to clean your WordPress database out on the Internet. Some of it is well-meaning but not all that useful. Here are a couple of things that you don’t need to worry about.

WordPress Database Cleanup.jpg

Cleaning Transients

Transients are little pieces of information that WordPress and plugins need to store temporarily. Transients have an expiration date. Some people will advise you to make sure you clean up expired transients every once in a while. Don’t bother. WordPress’ cron system will do this for you every night. At best, you may delete a few hundred records a few hours early. The effort you put into managing transients is an effort you could better spend making your site prettier, faster, or more useful to your readers.

Optimizing Tables

A lot of places will tell you to “optimize your tables”. Some might even explain what this means while others just used it as a magic incantation that is supposed to make you feel better about your database. The truth is that there was a time when optimizing database tables was important. Thankfully those days are long gone. These days most MySQL databases use tables that don’t require optimization. Even my crusty old personal site’s database no longer needs to be optimized. Technically, it is no longer necessary to do this for 99.9% of WordPress installations out there. If you are part of the other .01%, instead of optimizing your tables, move your site to a modern version of MySQL with a table type that does not need optimization

Plugins that do all of this for you

Yes, there are things you need to do on a regular basis to keep your database clean and healthy. Yes, you or a programmer working for you can do these things manually on a regular basis. However, if you are like most of us, you don’t like having to remember to clean things up. For those cases, there are plugins that can do all of this and much more for you, automatically.  Think of them as the Roomba for your site. These plugins will come out while you aren’t around and take care of cleaning up the dusty corners of your site for you on a regular basis.

Here are four options you can consider:

Advanced Database Cleaner

This plugin is available in both free and premium. The free version will do all of the basics you need to be done. You can even schedule it to run on a regular basis so that your database stays clean. The Pro version will give you many more options. I recommend starting with the free until you understand what it does and then if you feel the need, move to the Pro.

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

This is another good choice although it does offer “tabel optimization” that I just got through telling you was unnecessary. It will keep your database clean of old posts, comments, revisions, and a bunch of other things. There aren’t as many options as Advanced Database Cleaner but the ones you really need are there. This plugin is free and there is a link to donate to the author if you use it and find it useful. (and I always suggest you donate to the authors of free plugins if you use their plugins)

If you do choose to analyze the tables, it will attempt to run analysis on them but if you are using a table type that doesn’t require this feature, it will tell you that. It won’t harm your database or any of your data.

WP-Optimize – Cache, Clean, Compress

Probably my favourite option though (and the one I have loaded on my personal site) is WP-Optimize. This performs all the functions we’ve discussed here plus a lot of other things. Like the previous two, you can schedule this plugin to run automatically. However, since this is written by the same team that wrote the very first plugin I recommended, UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin, it integrates with that seamlessly and gives you the option to automatically back your database up before it performs maintenance. This is a nice feature. Like Updraft Plus, WP-Optimize comes in a free and paid version. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether you need the features present in the paid version.

Wrap Up

Keeping your WordPress database clean is an important step to making sure that your site always runs quickly. Either invest the time to manually clean your site on a regular basis or install and configure one of the recommended plugins to do it for you. Either way, it is time well spent.

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How to remove “Are you enjoying Advanced Flat Rate shipping for Woocommerce Plugin?”

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How to remove Are you enjoying Advanced Flat Rate shipping for Woocommerce Plugin?

How to remove Are you enjoying Advanced Flat Rate shipping for Woocommerce Plugin?

This great little plugin helps many websites offer Flat Rate Shipping. However, it comes with a very annoying message in the dashboard that is visible on all website pages.

To have that nasty little message removed, go to your hosting account and go inside the file path below and edit the file.

Simply add the comment tag  “//” before the line at aproximatively positon 125 to 130 ”

//require_once plugin_dir_path( dirname( __FILE__ ) ) . ‘includes/class-advanced-flat-rate-shipping-for-woocommerce-user-feedback.php’

File path: “wp-content\plugins\woo-extra-flat-rate\includes\class-advanced-flat-rate-shipping-for-woocommerce.php”

After you do that you will not see that banner. It should be gone from all the pages.

For more tips and how-to tutorials, visit or blog more often.

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Good Inbound marketing efforts

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Inbound Marketing

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing, in simple terms, is the process of helping potential customers find your company. This frequently happens before the customer is even ready to make a purchase, but making contact early can turn into brand preference and, ultimately, leads and revenue. Inbound marketing is a strategy that utilizes many forms of pull marketing—content marketing, blogs, events, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and more—to create brand awareness and attract new business. Whereas outbound marketing seeks out customers, inbound marketing focuses on visibility, so potential buyers come to you. Instead of “renting attention,” companies employing inbound marketing focus on new methods geared toward building awareness, developing relationships, and generating leads.

These methods make you attractive to customers because they don’t make people feel like they’re being sold to. The content provided by inbound marketing is educational, entertaining, and welcomed by consumers. When done correctly, inbound marketing can return dramatically better results than traditional marketing that disrupts prospects rather than giving them an open invitation to engage. When consumers find your company this way, it has a stronger influence on their future marketing decisions and their feelings toward your business in general. The best part? Inbound marketing consists of entirely organic leads, so it relies on brains rather than budget.

Inbound marketing has the powerful ability to put customers in the driver’s seat, connecting you with people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say. Aside from lead conversions and customer retention, inbound marketing can do wonders for social media shares, brand awareness, and search engine optimization efforts. A robust inbound marketing program allows customers to engage with your brand at any time. This allows you to generate qualified leads for much less money than traditional marketing. As the creation of data continues to increase—according to IBM, we create 2.6 quintillion bytes of data per day—information abundance and attention scarcity will only continue to climb. The empowered buyer has all the information they need to make a buying decision at their fingertips any time, any place. Detail specs, pricing, and product/service reviews are right in their pocket, not to mention social media’s impact on information sharing. To be successful in this evolving landscape, visibility through inbound marketing is key.

Inbound Marketing

Common problems that inbound marketing can solve

When it comes to implementing a long-term strategy, inbound marketing is an investment that will help you increase brand awareness, preference, and ultimately, revenue.

  • Problem: I need to increase my brand awareness. Up to 93% of buying cycles start with an online search. If your company appears at the top of search results or is active on a searcher’s social network, you can organically increase your brand awareness. To do that, you must make sure you have the right content and messaging in place to show up in these key inbound channels.
  • Problem: I want to improve my brand preference. By educating, entertaining, and interacting with potential customers before they are thinking about making a purchase, you build trust and increase the likelihood that they will choose you when they are ready to buy. Never underestimate the impact of becoming a familiar face.
  • Problem: I need to generate more leads but have less to invest. Inbound marketing is a long-term investment that builds on itself over time. Your results will multiply many times over as you become more adept at creating and curating content that naturally attracts organic leads.
  • Problem: I’m not sure I have the staff or budget to do inbound marketing. Like many things, the more you put into inbound efforts, the more you’ll get out of it.  But, if you have a good strategy in place that outlines key themes, content, and distribution, you can make sure to avoid wasted efforts.

ROI of a successful inbound marketing program

Inbound marketing is unique in that it generally has less of an up-front cost than other marketing efforts, and it can have a seriously impressive ROI when used correctly.

  • Inbound marketing brings leads to you. Inbound marketing generates three times more leads per dollar than traditional methods (Content Marketing Institute).
  • Inbound marketing is easy on your budget. Businesses that mainly rely on inbound marketing save more than $14 for every newly acquired customer (Hubspot).
  • Inbound marketing has a proven ROI. 44% of brands that use marketing automation software see ROI within six months, while 75% see ROI after one year

Planning, implementing and optimizing your inbound marketing program

When it comes to inbound marketing, the more you invest, the greater your return. Creating killer content is about brains and commitment rather than budget. You can’t throw money at content and make it effective, you have to put your head and heart into it. Here’s how to get started:

  • Step 1: Define your business goals and buyer personas. Identify your target audience and learn all you can about them. You can’t write content to inform your customers until you know your audience.
  • Step 2: Provide content at every stage. Preemptively answer the questions that your customers are likely to have at each stage of their buying journey. Determine your unique, compelling story. Why should your audience listen to you? The concept of what we call transformational inbound marketing goes beyond traditional inbound marketing techniques. Unlike traditional inbound, transformational inbound leverages valuable content to attract and retain customers throughout their entire lifecycle, not just before they are a customer but also after. Additionally, transformational inbound marketing puts a greater emphasis on personalization and relevance.
  • Step 3: Choose your delivery platforms. The more valuable the content you create for your audience, the more likely you will win them as customers. Determine the best way to reach them, whether it’s through Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, your blog, or elsewhere.
  • Step 4: Create and execute your content calendar. It is important to create a schedule that will consistently turn out fresh and relevant content to continue to engage your audience. By keeping a constant stream of content that addresses your customers’ questions, issues, and pain points, you’ll maintain relevance and build your brand as a trusted thought leader.
  • Step 5: Analyze results and optimize your inbound marketing program. There’s a variety of metrics to choose from when measuring the success of your inbound marketing efforts. Whether you decide to analyze SEO rankings, inbound links, or the number of articles published, these resources will provide valuable insight into how your campaigns are performing. Set aside time for analysis weekly. This step will aid you in understanding how effective your inbound marketing efforts have been and how they can improve.
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How Website Speed Affects Your SEO Rankings?

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Web design Company Galway

Website speed effect on organic searches after the Core Web Vitals update

According to Neil Haig, an expert in international SEO, speaker and author, “Website Speed is already a ranking factor along with many others, as the page experience one will be and we shouldn’t expect an “extreme” shift in our rankings due to it.“ Stefan seems to agree with it and even says “Hardly any IMHO, it’s a PR play and it’s already in the algorithm. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore this.”

Overall all the experts who took part in the chat agree that we shouldn’t expect a dramatic immediate shift in our SEO rankings as a result of the Core Web Vitals update for a number of reasons. These new metrics are just 3 out of 200 other ranking factors and they will not get special priority so their relative weight will be quite low. Furthermore, Google will roll this update slowly starting in May till August 2021 to gather data, so any changes would not have an immediate impact.

Stefan from Media PRO Web Design, our Web Development Team Leader and WordPress Initiatives Manager expects that this update will have “a bigger impact on small-volume keywords, local searches and niche ones where there aren’t big, authoritative sites that have already optimized their content.” If your site is already fast, you have fewer reasons to worry.

A few things you should do are:

  • Optimize your images
  • Add Lazy load of images
  • Use caching for static assets
  • Serve an alternative image format like WebP
  • Minify JavaScript and CSS
  • Limit third party script
  • Uninstall unnecessary plugins
  • Get a fast cloud hosting like Irish Hosting
  • Use MemcacheD & Varnich Caches.
  • Use CDN’S
  • Do not use custom fonts.
  • disengage in Thir-Party scripting running on your site
  • Block Image linking from your host

After you have successfully done all of the above, your site should run under 1 second,  making it fast enough to avoid Google Penalties. As we are aware that most users are finding the tasks above hard to achieve, we put together a nice pack. Let us do this for you.

Follow this link and order your WordPress Website Speed Optimisation Package now.

WORDPRESS WEBSITE SPEED OPTIMISATION

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DARK MODE WEB DESIGN 2021

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Web Design Services Galway

MEDIA PRO WEB DESIGN

The dark mode web design is a low-light user interface that uses a dark color as the main background color. It’s the reversal of a typical white layout that designers have used for many years. In response to the increasing number of hours we spend on our phones, designers have discovered that dark theme layouts help with eye strain, especially in low-light surroundings.

Already a massive trend in 2020 and 2021, dark mode is ready to become more even popular in 2022 too. Here are some reasons why Media PRO Web Design Galway loves the dark mode:

  • It looks super-modern. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Apple are just a handful of brands that offer alternative themes on their platforms;
  • It highlights and allows other design elements to pop;
  • It incorporates a stylish and mysterious appearance that contributes to a website’s unique appearance;
  • Easier on the eyes than traditional brighter screens, especially in a low-light environment;
  • Reduces eye strain in low-light conditions;
  • It can even save your mobile device’s battery power!

web design

The dark mode is being implemented more and more, in mobile apps as well as website layouts. Not all website users prefer dark mode and some will want to switch back and forth between dark and light. Irrespective of how or why you are using dark mode, users should be able to toggle the feature on or off. The dark mode should be a preference, not a requirement.

It’s important to note, whether or not you decide to cross over to the dark side, the decision should be based on the requirements of your audience, your brand’s message, and how people interact with your website. We suggest that people focus more on SEO, (Search Engine Optimisation), usability/functionality, and on marketing the website rather than the overall look of a website. Web Design trends are precisely that: Trends…

There’s no denying that dark mode is an emerging trend. Expect this trend to continue well into 2022 also.

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10 times Facebook violated your privacy online

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Web Design Galway

Another day, another Facebook leak. What are the odds? This time, it seems that personal information for just over half a billion users has leaked online. That’s more than the combined populations of the U.S., Australia, the UK, and Canada.Web Design Galway

Facebook harvests a lot of your data for internal use, but it’s also no stranger to data breaches that expose your information to the public. Many of us know it doesn’t have a stellar privacy record, but the actual scale of all its leaks is astonishing.

Let’s take a look at ten times Facebook has exposed user data.

533 million user profiles in 2021

In Facebook’s latest fiasco, revealed in April 2021, personal details were leaked to a publicly accessible hacking forum. Compromised data includes emails, Facebook IDs, phone numbers, birth dates, and location information.

It gets worse.

Facebook then announced that it wouldn’t disclose which users had been affected by the leak.

It gets worse.

They wouldn’t disclose which users were affected because they have no idea who they are.

What?!

To be fair, the information wasn’t obtained by hacking into Facebook servers, but rather through a process called scraping, which uses bots to extract data from websites. All data available in this leak was scraped from Facebook before September 2019. While affected profiles could currently be using updated personal data, cybercriminals could still use this information to impersonate other people.

419 million user phone numbers in 2019

Last year was not a good year for Facebook as hundreds of millions of user phone numbers were left exposed on a public server. The records included 133 million numbers on file of U.S.-based Facebook users, 18 million of those in the UK, and 50 million Vietnamese users.

Both the users’ unique Facebook ID and the phone number associated with the account were left on the server. Some also included the name, gender, and country. No one knows who owned the offending server or how the data had been scraped off of Facebook’s own records.

267 million records left exposed on the dark web in 2019

Facebook IDs, phone numbers, and names of over 267 million users, most of them in the U.S., were found on an unsecured database on the dark web. Security researcher Bob Diachenko, who discovered the breach, traced the database back to Vietnam and said that it could have been the work of automated bots programmed to scrape publicly available information from Facebook profiles.

It’s also possible that the data could have been stolen directly from Facebook’s developer API.

The offending records were available to anyone for up to two weeks before discovery. A hacker forum also posted a downloadable link to the data set.

6 million phone numbers and email addresses in 2013

In June 2013, Facebook disclosed that a technical glitch in its database had exposed the contact details of 6 million users, a problem that began in 2012. Facebook users who downloaded contact data of their friends were given additional information that shouldn’t have been made available.

Facebook said it fixed the bug on their website within 24 hours of its discovery and only announced it to the public after confirming that the bug was no longer operational.

14 million user profiles in 2018

A Facebook glitch caused 14 million users to have their new posts set to “public” rather than their preferred privacy setting.

This happened during the rollout of a new feature and was not addressed for four days. At the time, Facebook sent a notification to its users reminding them to check on the status of their privacy settings and revert back to their preferences.

If you would like to check who can see your Facebook posts, go to Settings > Privacy > Your Activity. There you can check who has access to future posts.

Up to 90 million user passwords in 2018

In one of its largest data breaches yet, Facebook confirmed that up to 90 million users could have had their accounts breached due to a bug in its “View As” feature.

The attackers exploited a vulnerability that allowed them to steal Facebook access tokens. Such tokens are digital keys, which store user login information and prevent them from having to re-enter their password everytime they use the Facebook app. As a result, the hackers could have taken over anyone’s account.

Facebook reset those access tokens, which required everyone affected to enter their login details again.

87 million records leaked to Cambridge Analytica in 2018

Personal data of over 87 million people was leaked to political research firm Cambridge Analytica after it exploited a vulnerability in its API. The leaks were linked to an online personality quiz titled “thisisyourdigitallife,” which more than 270,000 Facebook users were paid to fill out. Cambridge Analytica pulled information related to friends lists from users who took the quiz and used it to build psychological profiles and analyze personality traits.

600 million passwords accessible in 2019

Security researcher Brian Krebs revealed in March 2019 that Facebook had stored the passwords of hundreds of millions of users in plaintext, making them accessible to employees. In some cases, the passwords dated back to 2012.

Krebs, quoting an unnamed source, said 2,000 engineers inside Facebook had potentially accessed the passwords. In total, there were 9 million internal queries to look up data elements that also contained plaintext user passwords.

In a statement, however, Facebook said these passwords were never visible to anyone outside the company and that they “found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them.”

540 million user records visible in 2019

Another damning leak followed shortly after the Krebs revelations. In this case, Facebook third-party app developers left hundreds of millions of records on publicly visible cloud servers.

Security researchers found a 146 GB data set uploaded by Mexican company Cultura Colectiva. The set included information pertaining to Facebook user activity, account names, and IDs, with over 540 million records. There was no way of knowing if anyone had accessed the database or misappropriated the information. The data set was removed shortly after Facebook became aware of the issue.

1.5 million user email contact lists in 2019

In April 2019, Facebook admitted that it had “unintentionally” siphoned the email address books of over 1.5 million users without asking for permission explicitly. The breach took place after Facebook asked new users to enter the password for their email account. It proceeded to upload all the email contacts onto its own servers.

The breach dated back to 2016, which meant it went on for almost three years before Facebook put a stop to it. It added that it had bolstered internal processes to prevent this from happening again.

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