Delete Expired Transients

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.