Nota Cleanup – Database & Site Optimizer

Nota Cleanup scans your database first — read-only, nothing is touched — and shows you exactly what can be cleaned, category by category, each labeled by risk level. You choose what to remove; conservative defaults keep risky categories unchecked, so a single click can never surprise you.

The cleanup engine is built for shared hosting: work runs in small time-budgeted batches chained in the background, so it never hits your server’s execution time limit, no matter how large your tables are. A stuck job can always be resumed with one click, and every run is logged.

What it cleans

• Expired transients (including site transients)
• Orphaned post meta, comment meta, term relationships and user meta
• Spam and trashed comments, trackbacks and pingbacks
• oEmbed caches
• Post revisions — with a “keep the most recent N” option
• Auto-drafts older than 7 days
• Old Action Scheduler entries (WooCommerce and other background tasks)
• Expired WooCommerce sessions
• Old WooCommerce logs (configurable retention window)
• Trashed posts and pages (high risk — never selected by default)

Row-by-row review for the riskier categories

Trashed posts/pages and orphaned user meta can be expanded to show the exact rows found — titles, dates, and the offending meta — so you can hand-pick which ones to delete instead of only ever cleaning the whole category at once. Paginated for large sites, with a one-click “select all” for when you really do want everything.

Autoloaded options report (unique)

The report most cleaners don’t give you: the 10 largest autoloaded options and the total autoload size — the data loaded into memory on EVERY page view, the sneakiest performance killer on shared hosting. Report-only by design: deleting an option can break the plugin that owns it, so we tell you what to ask your developer instead of handing you a footgun.

Unused options report — with optional cleanup

A scanner that goes further than the autoload report: it searches the literal source of every active and inactive plugin and theme for each non-core option name, then splits what it finds into two tiers. “No reference found in any installed code” is the strongest signal — flagged options are shown with a truncated, color-coded preview of their stored value so you can recognize them at a glance, and only this tier can be selected and deleted directly, behind a confirmation step that recommends a backup first (with a one-click link to our free Nota Backup & Restore plugin). “Found only in an inactive plugin” stays report-only, since reactivating that plugin would put the option back to use.

This is a heuristic, not proof: a plugin that builds an option name dynamically (prefix + variable at runtime) can never appear as a literal string match, so it can be missed even though the option is genuinely still in use. The scan warns about this limitation before you delete anything, and deletion is scoped only to the strongest-signal tier for that reason.

Table health

A dedicated Tables tab shows the size, storage engine, and overhead of every table in your database, sorted so the most reclaimable table is always at the top. Optimize any single table with one click — no bulk “optimize everything” button, because a large table can briefly lock during an optimize and that should always be a deliberate, one-table-at-a-time choice.

Weekly automatic cleanup

Optionally run the low-risk categories automatically every week. Off by default — you turn it on only if you want it.

Honest engineering notes

• Deletions use direct SQL for speed; other plugins’ per-row delete hooks are not fired. Linked data (meta, comments, term relationships) is removed in the same run, so nothing is left dangling.
• Term relationships are only cleaned for taxonomies registered to post types — unknown plugin taxonomies are left alone.
• If your site uses an external object cache (Redis/Memcached), transients live there, not in the database; the plugin detects this and tells you, instead of silently doing nothing.
• On some MySQL/MariaDB setups, InnoDB reports table overhead as a shared figure rather than a true per-table number. When we detect this, the Tables tab shows “N/A” instead of a misleading number — Optimize still works normally.

Safety, honestly

The scan is always read-only. Before any cleanup runs, you see exact row counts and confirm; high-risk categories are never pre-selected. If you’d like a safety net first, the confirmation screen offers one-click access to our free Nota Backup & Restore plugin — no pressure, just a shortcut if you want it.