How to Redirect WordPress 404 Not Found Page to Homepage

2 comments

Most of the time, WordPress 404 not found page does not provide much valuable information to the visitors who stuck at that page. One of the solutions is to redirect it to more meaningful page, especially the Homepage.

Although some people may argue, the usefulness of the redirects. However, I prefer to do so on some of my websites. The following procedure, guides on how to redirect.

In WordPress admin area, head up to “Appearence” & click on “Editor”
On the right hand site, click on file “404.php”. File description is “404 Template”.
If the file does not exist, create one. If it does replace it with the following code & click save.

<?php
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: ".get_bloginfo('url'));
exit();
?>

However, if you want to redirect to other pages, use the following code but remember to replace “YOURPAGEURL” with your page URL. Make sure you leave the open & close quotes.

<?php
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: ".get_bloginfo('url')."YOURPAGEURL");
exit();
?>

How to Clean up Comment Meta in WordPress Database

4 comments

Wordpress

Codes, How to?, MySQL Database

If you have a wordpress blog for sometimes, you may notice that, wordpress database keeps growing. The table that really growing is “wp_ commentmeta”. I check in one of my oldest blogs. The tables size are as follows,

wp_comment ~ 0.5MB
wp_commentmeta ~ 8MB
wp_posts ~ 4MB
wp_postsmeta ~ 0.6MB

“wp_commentmeta” contains more data than all my posts. Is it a useful data or just a junk?

After a quick check on the table, it contains mostly “akismet_result”, “akismet_history” & “akismet_as_submitted” meta key. Search on the internet regarding this, reveal that the entries created by akismet plugins in relation to spam comments. The entries will not get deleted even after all spam comments deleted permanently.

Due to this I believe it should be OK to purge it. However, remember to backup your database prior to removing these entries.

Once done with the database backup log in to phpMyAdmin, select the right database & click on “SQL” menu on the top.

There are two (2) steps to fully remove the junk.

1.) Clean up “wp_commentmeta” entries which have no relation to wp_comments

Use the following command to look at “junk” entries. It also shows the number of “junk” entries.

SELECT * FROM wp_commentmeta WHERE comment_id
NOT IN (
SELECT comment_id
FROM wp_comments
)

Once satisfied, execute the following command to remove the “junk” entries.

DELETE FROM wp_commentmeta WHERE comment_id
NOT IN (
SELECT comment_id
FROM wp_comments
)

After optimizing the database, the table size drop to ~5MB.

2.) Clean up Akismet related metadata in wp_commentmeta table.

Use the following command to look at “junk” entries. It also shows number of “junk” entries.

SELECT * FROM wp_commentmeta WHERE meta_key
LIKE "%akismet%"

Once satisfied, execute the following command to remove the “junk” entries.

DELETE FROM wp_commentmeta WHERE meta_key
LIKE "%akismet%"

After perform database optimization, table size drop to 0MB. That is a whopping 8MB of junk.