WPThumbs
Themes Plugins By purpose By industry Best-of lists Fix it guides
Free Plugin by webaware v2.0.7

Delete Expired Transients

Delete old, expired transients from WordPress wp_options table

Delete Expired Transients

The facts

Rating
5★ from 13
Active installs
5k+
Price
Free
Last updated
12 May 2026
Added
Jul 2013
Requires WP
3.7
Tested up to
WP 7.0.4
Requires PHP
5.3
Downloads
121,230

Our analysis

AI-assisted

Delete Expired Transients is a WordPress plugin designed to remove old, expired transients from the options table in your database. By scheduling a daily task, it ensures that expired transients are deleted efficiently, helping to prevent database bloat and potential slowdowns on your website. It performs this task with minimal resource usage and is optimised for WordPress Multisite.

This plugin is suitable for WordPress users who want to maintain their database's performance by regularly cleaning up expired transients, especially if they are not using an object cache like memcached.

Best for: WordPress users looking to optimise their database performance.

What it does well

  • Removes expired transients to prevent database bloat
  • Schedules daily tasks for automatic cleanup
  • Optimised for fast performance and low resource usage
  • Compatible with WordPress Multisite
  • Does not collect personally identifying information

Where it falls short

  • Limited information on additional features or customisation options

Verdict

Delete Expired Transients provides a straightforward solution for managing expired transients in WordPress. It is a practical choice for those wanting to keep their database clean and efficient.

From the developer

webaware's own description of Delete Expired Transients, lightly tidied.

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:

If you’d like to help out by translating this plugin, please sign up for an account and dig in.

Contributions

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.

Read the full description on the official page →

Tagged as

Alternatives

Other plugins for running multilingual.

Translate WordPress with GTranslate

Translate WordPress with Google Translate multilanguage plugin using AI translation. Complete multilingual SEO...

Free 900k+ installs 4.9★ (4,950)
Loco Translate

Translate WordPress plugins and themes directly in your browser. Versatile PO file editor with integrated AI t...

Free 1M+ installs 4.8★ (452)
TranslatePress

Translate your site visually, directly from the front-end. Go multilingual in minutes using automatic AI trans...

Free 400k+ installs 4.7★ (1,653)
Cyr-To-Lat

Convert Non-Latin characters in post, page and term slugs to Latin characters.

Free 300k+ installs 4.7★ (98)
WP Chat App

Integrate WhatsApp experience directly into your WordPress website.

Free 100k+ installs 4.9★ (219)