WordPress, Autoloaded Options Could Affect Site Performance – Site Health Warning

• Note: I assumed a high level of user proficiency with Ubuntu, MySQL, and WordPress with this particular article. If you need clarification on any of the points please leave a comment and I will expand the article to include beginners, those learning Ubuntu to create a more user friendly document.

I run a few WordPress based websites and came across a message that was new to me. I discovered the error with the standard WordPress tool ‘Site Health’. It looks like this:

So I opened a terminal session and whipped up a mysql command to display the the wp_options tables where the autoloaded components are loaded (“yes”) and sorted them from highest to lowest. I only showed the top 10 for the time being. This portion performed at the shell with command line tools.

• mysql> SELECT option_name, length(option_value) AS option_value_length FROM wp_options WHERE autoload=’yes’ ORDER BY option_value_length DESC LIMIT 10;
  +————————————————-+———————-+
  | option_name————————————| option_value_length|
  +————————————————-+———————-+
  | w3tc_pagespeed_data_https://azure.zettabytes.org |——–627815 |
  | extend_builder_theme | —————————————227196 |
  | extend_builder_theme_1608493072 |————————-222257 |
  | colibri_page_builder_demo_sites |—————————–74641 |
  | wphb_styles_collection |—————————————-28434 |
  | wphb_scripts_collection |—————————————19626 |
  | rewrite_rules |—————————————————18786 |
  | jetpack_active_plan |——————————————–15918 |
  | wp_user_roles |————————————————–11584 |
  | jp_sync_error_log_sync |——————————————9839 |
  +————————————————–+———————+
• 10 rows in set (0.02 sec)

I noticed that those top 3 options were from themes and a caching program I no longer use. As you can see, those alone account for the 1 megabyte limit where the WordPress Site Health tool triggered. So I whipped up another couple of mysql commands to delete those:

• delete from wp_options where autoload = ‘yes’ and option_name like ‘%w3tc_pagespeed_data%’;
• delete from wp_options where autoload = ‘yes’ and option_name like ‘%extend_builder_theme%’;

And that does it!

This short article was meant as a response and fix to a question I saw on one of the Ubuntu forums. So I just list the error and the quick solution I came up with. I’m not doing background on the error or writing a long convoluted explanation this time. Just the error, and the quickest way (for me) to fix it.

**Please forgive the terrible formatting on the WordPress options table above. It didn’t copy/paste correctly but the important information is the numbers off to the right measured in bytes. 627815 = 627815 bytes, or 628 Kilobytes.

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