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If you’re using Fluent CRM, and you’ve got a really big email list, and you send them a lot, I need to show you something that you’re going to need to control, because I just enrolled a client, and his database was absolutely bloated, and so I want to show you what happened. So I had a new client sign up for concierge, okay? And when you sign up for concierge, one of the things that we usually do, unless they request not to, is we’re going to move it over to Rocket Hosting. Now, when I look at that, I want to gage out what the size of the site is and how things stand before I bring it over. Interesting thing is, with this new client, I logged And I went to his Site Tools. It’s under the Tools section, but it’s like Site Health or something like that. I went over there and noticed that the size of his database was 91 gigabytes, which is pretty much one of the largest WordPress databases I have ever seen. And I’m like, I’m not moving that over to Rocket. We’ve got to clean that thing up first. The other thing that we noticed was that when you log in to the back-end of WordPress for him, his dashboard, the actual administrative dashboard, was slow as molasses.

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It would take a minute to two minutes to load up. The funny thing is, when you go to other screens inside of WordPress, it was loading up okay, but that dashboard was really, really slow. So So that was two pieces of information. And so I needed to go and find out what the heck was going on. So his existing web host was Bluehost. Now, definitely not one of my favorite hosts out there. So my first thing was, do we have ourselves a security problem here? Because I’ve seen it all too often on Bluehost sites. But I went ahead and I asked for his login, went into his Bluehost account, and I opened up phpMyAdmin. That way I could actually check out the database. Now, looking here at his database, You can see that there’s a lot of stuff in here. The big thing I noticed right off the bat was that this table here, which is for Fluent CRM, the campaign emails, got over 1.2 million rows in it. That’s a lot. But that wasn’t the source of our problem, because even with that, it’s not even a full gigabyte. That’s a lot of data right there, but that was not the problem.

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When we went down further, what I noticed here was that when we came down here, I’ll show you the exact table that was the problem. It’s not no longer, but it’s this one right here, which is for Fluent SMTP, their email logging functionality. As of this point, I’ve only got five records in there. But when I first got here, and I hadn’t flushed it yet, we had almost 2.4 million entries in here, and the size of the database table was 88 gigabytes. It was humongous, okay? So that was definitely the source of the problem. Now, he’s got a pretty big email list. He’s got over 98,000 subscribers, which is definitely a large list for being a site of Fluent CRM. And then come to find out, apparently, he was sending to these people basically twice a week. And so essentially, Fluent CRM is sitting here sending out about 200,000 emails every single week, probably a little bit more when you include transactional emails and stuff that’s popping out from WordPress itself. That’s a lot of emails. And the The next thing is, Fluent SMTP has a logging function. And if you don’t control that logging function, if you send out this email volume, it can really, really blimp up.

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The other thing, too, is remember that dashboard, how the dashboard was loading up real slow? It was because of the sheer size of the table. Because when you’re using Fluent SMTP, there’s a little dashboard widget there that’s trying to show you how many emails were sent today, yesterday, the last week. Things things like that. Well, it was trying to query this massive, massive table and therefore slowing down the dashboard. The moment that we flush the logs, the dashboard is now fast as it’s supposed to be. So let me show you what we did. Basically, go to settings, go over to your fluent SMTP setup, okay? And you can see in this case, he’s gone and got five entries in there, which is what I just showed you from the database itself. But what you want to do is you want to go over to email logs, and then you want to hit delete all logs. That’s the first thing that you want to do in in order to flush out anything that’s sitting in there. That’s what I did for him, and it immediately solved our speed problems because the database got, or at least that table got emptied.

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But here’s what you need to do from there. You need to go back over to settings, and at the very minimum, you want to check this box. It says, Disable logging for Fluent CRM emails. We simply don’t need to do that. You may not even need to log emails at all. It’s totally up to you. But this is one of the functions of Fluent SMTP. The thing is, Fluent CRM is also logging emails that you’re sending out to your leads in your database. And so you really don’t need Fluent SMTP to also log this stuff. He was sending out so much email that even though we’ve got the log set here to purge after 14 days, it just wasn’t doing it because of the amount of email he was sending. We’re sending out 200,000, probably more than that emails every single week. But I think what was going on is there was so much other stuff going on. The log, even within 14 days, got to be that large, and we couldn’t handle it. So that’s the answer. It was right here. We just disable that logging functionality, and then possibly you make it where it’s just not logging it at all.

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See, when you’re using Fluent CRM, it is keeping a log of all the emails sent to each of your lead. That’s why when you go to a contact profile and you go over to the Emails tab, you can actually see a history of the emails that each lead was sent. It’s also what we use in order to get analytics on the campaigns that you sent and stuff like that. Now, obviously, when somebody is sending out this volume of email with Fluent CRM, it is still logging all that stuff. And so you might want to even consider having Fluent CRM purge stuff out as well. Let me show you where you can do that. All right, in Fluent CRM, you want to head on over to settings, then you want to go on down to tools. Now, this tool screen inside of Fluent CRM allows you to look at some of the geeky stuff in terms of cron and stuff like this. But what you’re going to look at here is called the data cleanup section. Now, we don’t have anything checked off right here, but this is one of those things where you can choose to select the email history logs, clicks, opens, activity logs, stuff like that.

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And if we check those off, it will then auto purge them on the amount of days that we enter here. So if I were to say, check this one and save it, then what will happen is that all the email history logs after 30 days will be automatically deleted. I’m not going to do that with his site here, but that would be one way of having Fluent CRM also clean up the information that it’s logging. Now, again, if you end up having Fluent CRM purge some of those logs, you’re not going to have the the full history of everything that each lead has been emailed. So it really just comes down to, do you need that information? I would say with Fluent CRM, if you’re using it for more like an actual CRM, you might want to just keep everything indefinitely. However, if we’re using it to send out major amounts of bulk email, which he is sending out 200,000 emails a week, it’s probably not necessary to go back and look at all that stuff. And so, again, you might want to then go ahead and just purge them. But there are two different things.

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You got Fluent CRM and it’s logging things. And as you can see, it’s not so bad in the database. And then you have Fluent SMTP, which is the SMTP plugin that basically routes all email being sent by WordPress through your chosen SMTP connection. He was basically logging every single thing, not only Fluent CRM emails, but basically everything that WordPress was sending And in his case, that was blumping this thing up to over 2.4 million emails in less than a 14-day period. And it was causing so much slow down and really, really blimping up the database to something I had never seen before. I have never seen a 91 gigabyte WordPress database. Well, I have now, and it was because of Fluent. So again, I want you to keep this in mind. I want you to go back and review your Fluent SMTP settings Fluent SMTP, by the way, happens to be my absolute favorite SMTP plugin. I know there’s a bunch of them out there. Don’t use, especially the one from Automoto, like WP Mail or whatever that thing’s called, because it’s just an upsell fast, and there’s just no need to pay for one of these things.

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Fluent SMP TP does what you need it to do, and it’s completely and totally free and always will be. You just want to take into account how much data you need to log with that thing and store in the database because depending on how you’re using the product, you may not need to log any of it. All right, if you have any questions, let me know.