276,000 autoloaded rows, loaded on every single page view
A store that felt slow everywhere at once. Not one slow page — every page. That pattern points at the options table, not the theme.
Multi-brand camera and pro-video retailer · WooCommerce · 2,300 SKUs
Measured 2026-07. The site is never named — see our policy on client anonymity below.
What changed, measured
| Measurement | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Autoloaded rows | 276,000 rows | 1,796 rows | -99% |
How it actually went
Autoload is the option group WordPress reads on every request, cached or not. It is invisible in every plugin dashboard, which is exactly why it grows for years without anyone noticing.
The rows were not junk from one bad plugin. They were sediment — settings, transients that never expired, and licence blobs left behind by plugins that had been removed long before we took the site on.
Nothing was deleted blind. Every option group was exported with a rollback key first, then removed in batches with the site under load, so a regression would name itself immediately.
A site that is slow on every page has a per-request problem, not a page problem. Read the options table before you touch the theme.
Other measured jobs
The “huge website” was 14% of the number the client was reading
79:1Safe reclaim vs risky reclaimStore C · 2026-09-03Zero of 261 category pages had a meta description
0 → 261Category pages with real meta copyStore D · 2026-08The database was being killed by its own configuration, every 40 minutes
19.63 GB → 1 GBInnoDB buffer pool, on a 3.8 GB serverStore E · 2026-08The plugin installed to make the site faster was the entire reason it was slow
281×slower per cache write, on disk versus in memoryPlans priced on the work,
not on the checklist
Month to month, no lock-in. Prices are per site, per month, exclusive of GST. Portfolios and multi-site estates are quoted on the estate.
For a site that just needs to stay up, patched and backed up
For a store where slow pages are costing orders
Running a portfolio you cannot afford to have go quiet? Managed starts from ₹17,999/mo.