In today’s short tutorial we’ll have a look at how to take care and backup our site’s database. This way we can make sure that our site runs optimally and prevent unexpected data loss.
What is the database?
According to Wikipedia a database is an organised collection of data, generally stored and accessed electronically from a computer system. This means that the WordPress database is the place where all our site’s generated data lives, posts, pages, users, comments and more, everything is stored in it. For more information about the WordPress database you can have a look at this WPBeginner glossary entry, and for an in depth look at the default tables and their relations you can check out the database description in the codex.
From all the above we can easily figure out that the database is pretty important for the well-being of our site, any corruption can result to irreversible loss of data and accumulation of clutter might make queries, and by extension our site, slower. Below we’ll find out how we can backup, optimize and repair our database, to prevent these issues.
To help us with these tasks we will be using the WP-DBManager plugin which is available for free in the WordPress plugin repository.