Transient Cleaner vs Delete Expired Transients

Clean expired transients from your options table. The original and best! Transient housekeeping was added to the core of WordPress after version 5.8. However, I have decided to open up this plugin to all versions to allow for manual transient cleaning. Longer term I am working on a new version of the plugin, designed specifically for all WordPress releases. Tested up to PHP 8.2 Fully complies with WordPress coding standards Compliant with the stronger WordPress VIP coding standards, as well as compatibility with their platform Community plugin – visit the Github page to get involved with the latest code development, request enhancements and report issues “Transients are a simple and standardized way of storing cached data in the WordPress database temporarily by giving it a custom name and a timeframe after which it will expire and be deleted.” Unfortunately, expired transients only get deleted when you attempt to access them. If you don’t access the transient then, even though it’s expired, WordPress will not remove it. This is a known “issue” but due to reasons, which are explained in the FAQ, this has not been adequately resolved. Why is this a problem? Transients are often used by plugins to “cache” data (my own plugins included). Because of this it means that expired data can be left and build up, resulting in a bloated database table. Meantime, this plugin is the hero that you’ve been waiting for. Simply activate the plugin, sit back and enjoy a much cleaner, smaller options table. It also adds the additional recommendation that after a database upgrade all transients will be cleared down. The Settings Screen Within Administration -> Tools -> Transients an options screen exists allowing you to tweak when you’d like cleaning to happen, including the ability to perform an ad-hoc run, and when you’d like the to be automatically scheduled. You can even request an optimization of the options table to give your system a real “pep”! Running in Lite mode A “lite” mode is available. By activating this the options screen will no longer appear and default settings will be used. The advantage? Improved performance to Admin and, especially if you’re running multi-site, no chance of anybody “tinkering” with the settings. To activate, use the following… define( 'TC_LITE', true ); This should be added to your wp-config.php file. Using hooks If you’re the type of odd person who likes to code for WordPress (really?) then I’ve added a couple of hooks so you can call our rather neat cleaning functions… housekeep_transients – this will clear down any expired transients clear_all_transients – this will remove any and all transients, expired or otherwise Acknowledgements I’d like to thank WordPress Developer Andrew Nacin for his early discussion on this. Also, I’d like to acknowledge the useful article at Everybody Staze for ensuring the proposed solution made sense, and W-Shadow.com for the cleaning code. Iconography is courtesy of the very talented Janki Rathod.

Delete old, expired transients from the WordPress options table (wp_options), to prevent them from bloating your database and even slowing down your website. Unless you are using an object cache (like memcached), WordPress stores transient records in the options table. Many transients are given an expiration time, so in theory they should disappear after some time. In practise, because old transients are only deleted when requested again after they’ve expired, many transients stay in the database. After a while, there can be thousands or even millions of expired transients needlessly taking up space in your options table, depending on what your plugins are doing. Delete Expired Transients schedules a daily task to delete any expired transients from the options table. It performs this operation with a single SQL query, and then runs a second query to find any orphaned expiration records and deletes them too. There are a few other plugins around that clean up expired transients. This one is written for fast performance, set-and-forget scheduled housekeeping, and maximum compatibility. It uses the PHP time to determine whether transients are expired, not the database time (which can be different). It does only one job, and it does it well with the minimum of resources. Now optimised for WordPress Multisite. Translations Many thanks to the generous efforts of our translators: English (en_CA) — the English (Canadian) translation team English (en_GB) — the English (British) translation team English (en_ZA) — the English (South African) translation team French (fr_FR) — the French translation team Hungarian (hu_HU) — the Hungarian translation team Norwegian: Bokmål (nb_NO) — neonnero Norwegian: Nynorsk (nn_NO) — neonnero Russian (ru_RU) — the Russian translation team Spanish (es_ES) — the Spanish translation team If you’d like to help out by translating this plugin, please sign up for an account and dig in. Contributions Translate into your preferred language Fork me on GitHub Privacy Delete Expired Transients does not collect any personally identifying information, and does not set any cookies. It removes some old information from the database, potentially reducing a website’s exposure to leakage of personally identifying information.