Your client’s site has been running smoothly for three years. Then one Monday morning, pages that loaded in under a second suddenly take ten. First question from the client: “Is the hosting broken?” The answer, almost always: no, the hosting platform is fine. The real culprit is closer to home—and it’s usually the database.
We’ve seen this scenario play out dozens of times over the last 16 years. A plugin quietly logs every search query. A redirect table that started with 50 entries and now holds 50,000. A watchdog table nobody thought to check. The site grew gradually—but the database hit a wall all at once.
The tricky part is that queries which worked fine with 1,000 rows can choke on 50,000. Tables that took milliseconds to scan now take seconds. And because the growth happened slowly, there was no single moment where something “changed.” The site simply reached an inflection point where database “sins” came home to roost.
In our online documentation, we’ve put together a guide titled “Database Best Practices“ covering the most common database issues we see on freistilbox: unbounded table growth, query anti-patterns, import mistakes. It provides guidance on index creation and cleanup strategies. We’ve also added two CMS-specific guides: one about WordPress-specific issues such as wp_options bloat, and one with Drupal-related advice like taming the watchdog table.
If your site is showing signs of database trouble, reach out—we’re happy to help you track down the cause.
