The most widely used cleanup plugin, free for the essential work, from the UpdraftPlus team. It removes revisions, auto-drafts, trashed items, spam and expired transients, and it optimises tables, all from one screen with checkboxes.

Its practical advantage is scheduling. A one-off cleanup fixes today and the accumulation resumes immediately, so the useful configuration is a weekly automatic run that keeps the database from ever getting bad again. It also integrates with UpdraftPlus, which matters because the correct order of operations here is always backup then clean, and having both from one vendor makes that a single habit. Premium tiers add multisite support and more granular control. For most sites the free version does everything that needs doing.

• Price: Free; premium tiers available
• Covers: Revisions, transients, trash, table optimisation
• Best for: Most sites, on a weekly schedule
• Watch out for: Does not address autoloaded options directly

The one that addresses the problem this article opened with. Beyond the usual cleanup, it identifies orphaned options and tables left behind by plugins you have deleted, and tells you which plugin each belongs to.

That attribution is the valuable part. Anybody can show you a list of database tables; showing you that a particular table belongs to a plugin you removed in 2023 is what makes deletion safe rather than a gamble. It does the same for options, which is the route to reducing autoloaded data. Free and premium versions exist. Treat it as an occasional audit tool rather than a scheduled task: run it once, understand what your database is carrying, remove what is genuinely dead, and repeat annually. The risk is real and worth stating: deleting a table belonging to a plugin you still use loses data permanently, so back up first, every time.

• Price: Free version; premium available
• Covers: Orphaned tables and options, with plugin attribution
• Best for: Sites with a long history of installing and removing plugins
• Watch out for: Deleting a live plugin’s table is unrecoverable

$29.95 a year for one site, $59.95 for three, $124.95 for unlimited sites, and relevant here for prevention rather than cleanup. It limits post revisions, controls the autosave interval, and disables features that generate database writes you do not need.

Prevention beats cleanup on a metric nobody measures: the cleanup you never have to run. Capping revisions at five per post means the problem stops growing, which is worth more than deleting fifty thousand rows once and watching them return. Its wider value is the script management described elsewhere in this pillar, so the database features are a bonus on a purchase justified by other means. At $124.95 for unlimited sites, an agency applying sane revision limits across a portfolio is doing more good per pound than any cleanup schedule.

• Price: $29.95/yr for 1 site; $124.95 for unlimited
• Covers: Revision limits, autosave control, feature disabling
• Best for: Stopping accumulation rather than clearing it
• Watch out for: Not a cleanup tool; pair with one

Free, and doing something entirely different from everything else here: it adds database indexes to WordPress’s core tables so that common queries run faster without deleting anything at all.

This matters because on a large site the problem frequently is not that the database contains junk but that the queries scanning it are inefficient. WordPress’s default indexes were designed for smaller sites, and on a posts table with hundreds of thousands of rows, or a postmeta table in the millions, the right index can turn a slow query into an instant one. Nothing is removed, so nothing is at risk of being removed wrongly, which makes it an unusually safe intervention. If your site is large and slow in the admin, particularly when filtering posts or orders, try this before deleting a single revision.

• Price: Free
• Covers: Adding indexes to core tables for faster queries
• Best for: Large sites and stores with slow admin screens
• Watch out for: Indexes take time to build on very large tables

Free, and the diagnostic tool that tells you whether any of this is your problem. It reports every database query a page runs, how long each took, and which plugin or theme was responsible.

Installing it before buying anything is the advice this whole category needs. Sites are routinely cleaned of fifty thousand revisions with no measurable improvement, because the actual problem was one plugin running a slow uncached query on every page load, which Query Monitor would have named in thirty seconds. It also reports the total number of queries per page, and a page running four hundred queries has a plugin problem rather than a housekeeping problem. Deactivate it when you are finished, since it adds overhead of its own.

• Price: Free
• Covers: Diagnosis, naming the plugin behind each slow query
• Best for: Finding out whether cleanup is even your issue
• Watch out for: Adds overhead; deactivate after diagnosing

Free, permanent, and it stops the largest source of accumulation before it starts. Setting a revision limit and lengthening the autosave interval takes two minutes and no plugin at all.

Limiting revisions to a small number, five is generous for most sites, means a heavily edited page keeps its recent history and discards the rest automatically. Extending the autosave interval from the default reduces the write frequency while editing, which matters on sites where several people work at once. Combined, these prevent the two mechanisms that generate most of the rows a cleanup plugin later removes. Everything else on this list is treatment; this is the vaccine, and it is free. Add an object cache if your host offers Redis or Memcached and you have addressed database load from both directions.

• Price: Free
• Covers: Revision limits and autosave frequency
• Best for: Every site, as a permanent preventative
• Watch out for: Back up wp-config.php before editing it