WordPress keeps a great deal that it never deletes. Every time you save a post it stores another full revision. Deleted posts and comments sit in the trash indefinitely. Plugins write transients with expiry times and then leave the expired rows behind. Post meta belonging to deleted posts is frequently orphaned rather than removed.

This feature clears all seven categories in one pass: post revisions, auto-drafts, trashed posts, spam comments, trashed comments, expired transients and orphaned post meta. The first six each have their own toggle, and orphaned post meta is always cleared. Revisions are the one you tune – by default it keeps the five most recent per post so you do not lose your editing history.

It removes rows that WordPress itself considers disposable. Published content, pages, media and settings are untouched.

Revisions live in the same wp_posts table as your published content. A site with 300 posts edited a dozen times each is carrying several thousand extra rows, and every query that touches wp_posts pays a cost for them. Expired transients pile up in wp_options, a table WordPress queries on every request.

The effect is not dramatic on a small site, but it compounds. Databases get slower gradually, backups take longer, and migrations become unwieldy. Clearing rows that serve no purpose is the cheapest performance work available, because nothing has to be rewritten or reconfigured to benefit from it.

Vectro issues targeted DELETE statements against wp_posts, wp_comments, wp_options and wp_postmeta, scoped by post type and status so nothing outside the listed categories is affected. Revisions are ordered by date and only those beyond your retention count are removed. While Clean Post Revisions is on, Vectro also sets WordPress’s own revision limit to the same number, so posts never store more revisions than that in the first place.

Deleting rows frees them logically but does not always return disk space to the operating system, because InnoDB keeps the freed pages for reuse. Run Database optimisation afterwards if you want the file size to come down as well.