WordPress Database Architecture

To help you understand how exactly WordPress works with MySQL, let’s run through the tables WordPress stores in a typical database.

WordPress has a fairly straightforward and uncomplicated database schema. It consists of 11 tables, which are used by core components of WordPress and cannot by deleted or removed.

wp_commentmeta – Stores the metadata from all comments left on your WordPress posts and pages, including custom post types.

wp_comments – Stores all comments made on your site, including published, draft, pending and spam comments.

wp_links – Holds all information entered into the links manager feature of WordPress, this is rarely used nowadays, with the link feature itself becoming deprecated from WordPress 3.5 and hidden by default on new installs.

wp_options – Not only are all WordPress options stored in this table, such as your reading and discussion settings, but it’s more common now for plugins to use wp_options for storing saved settings as opposed to a custom table.

wp_postsmeta – As you’ve most probably guessed this table stores all metadata associated with your posts and pages.

wp_posts – Stores all your posts, as well as your pages and also your navigation/menu items.

wp_terms – This table stores the categories for posts, links, and the tags.

wp_term_relationships – Posts are associated with categories and tags from the wp_terms table, and this association is maintained in the wp_term_relationships table. The association of links to their respective categories is also kept in this table.

wp_term_taxonomy – Describes the taxonomy such as a category, link, or tag for the entries in the wp_terms_table.

wp_usermeta – Stores the metadata of all the users from the wp_userstable.

wp_users – All your users are stored within this table. Remember, data such as passwords are serialized.

Share on Google Plus