The wp_options bomb
The table WordPress loads in full on every page view, quietly stuffed with megabytes of junk from plugins you deleted years ago.
Not filmed yet
The lesson is written out below. The video comes after.
There is a table called wp_options, and a portion of it is marked to load automatically — meaning WordPress reads it in full on every single page view, for every visitor, forever.
Plugins write to it. Plugins that you deleted also wrote to it, and deleting the plugin does not remove the rows. Five years of that and it is not unusual to find several megabytes being read on every request to serve settings for software that is not installed any more.
It is invisible to every caching and speed plugin, because it is not a slow query and it is not a big image — it is just a large read that happens constantly. Finding it is one command. Cleaning it is a judgement call about what is still in use, which is exactly the kind of thing worth having an assistant list out for you before you delete anything.
The one thing to keep
No speed plugin will ever tell you about this one.
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