Here are some ideas:

1. Go to your Plugins page and look for plugins you aren’t using. If you temporarily aren’t using a plugin, just deactivate it. Or, uninstall the plugin completely.

2. Find and fix those lingering 404 dust-bunnies.

3. Optimize your database tables to clear out that accumulating table clutter.

4. Clean out that obsolete code — check to see if you need to upgrade WordPress and/or your installed plugins.

While on the cyber spring-cleaning topic, it would also be a good idea to clean your computer and peripherals… a lot of gunk can collect there over time.

Here are two ways to do it.

Method 1: WP-DBManager

Download and install the WP-DBManager plugin.

The plugin allows you to, among other things, optimize your tables from within your WordPress admin (just go to the “Databases” section and click the “Optimize DB” tab), as well as schedule table optimizations on a regular basis.

However, the plugin also lets you delete tables and provides an interface for running MySQL queries, so if you don’t like the idea of all that power being vested in your WordPress admin, you can try the phpMyAdmin method instead.

Method 2: phpMyAdmin

Here are the steps for using the phpMyAdmin software.

1. Go to your web hosting account’s cPanel and click the “phpMyAdmin” icon. If you don’t see one, look for a “MySQL Databases” icon, click it, scroll to the bottom of the page, and click the “phpMyAdmin” link.

2. Select your WordPress database.

3. Look in the “Overhead” column. If you see a table with overhead, click the overhead value.

4. Click the “Optimize Table” link.

5. Once it’s done, click the Back button twice (to go back to the tables list), and repeat from step 3.

And that’s it!