@iamdandavies

Now this is an easy way to speed up your WordPress website. if you think just by deactivating and deleting a plugin that it's gone, then you're wrong. WordPress doesn't quite work that way.

Most plugins store temporary data called transients, and these are just cached values that save WordPress from calling them over and over again every time they need it.

And each transient stores two values inside your WordPress database under the WP Options table. Now, WordPress is a specific way on how to delete these transients. And if you delete the plugin and you just remove it, nothing actually cause it to be deleted.

So it just sits there and creates blow and slows down your website. Now, as the months and years go by, as you got a WordPress website and you add and remove different plugins, these transients build up and you've probably got thousands of them in your database. Now, the chances are you don't see them, you don't even know that they're there, but they're in the database, they're creating bloat, and they're slowing down the database and the website from real, genuine queries that need to use the WP Options table.

Now, there's some really cool plugins out there that you can use to help clean this up, and one of them is called WP Optimize. And even tools like WP Rocket are really good at cleaning this up. And generally speaking, it's safe, because what happens is these transients get Regenerated over and over as they're needed.

So when you delete them, the ones that are needed will regenerate, but the ones that you're no longer needed will just not be generated again. So what I suggest is that you get one of these plugins, you go and check the transient sections, and then you can see whether you've got thousands or hundreds of thousands of entries in these transients, and if you have, you can clear them and let them automatically regenerate.

Obviously, always take a backup of your database, but this is generally. Over the 15 years that I've been doing, it has been safe and has never caused me any issues. If you want me to make a video on how to do this using something like WP Optimize or WP Rocket, just let me know in the comments and I'll do that next.