Database Optimization for Ninja Forms

Hello @tzshng,

Thank you for reaching out! I understand your concern about your database slowing down with more and more forms being created. I am not part of Ninja Forms team, but just a volunteer on the forum. Ninja Forms store submissions in the wp_posts and wp_posts_meta tables. I would suggest to focus on optimizing the site and the database periodically as the number of forms and submissions isn’t necessarily the issue.

Here’s an article by Ninja Forms on how to optimize the site: https://ninjaforms.com/blog/speed-up-wordpress/

You can also consider using plugins to optimize your site periodically such as this one: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-optimize/ (This plugin works well with Ninja Forms)

Aside from optimizing the database and Ninja Forms itself, look at what plugins you have installed on the site that are not being used at all and consider removing them, use a CDN, use caching, etc.

Hi @tzshng again!

I forgot to mention this plugin – Query Monitor – https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/query-monitor/. This plugin can help find the source of slowness on the site.

Thanks for getting back to me. I’ve reviewed the optimizations you mentioned. While normal loading and reading aren’t major issues, we hit a bottleneck when there are a lot of posts and over 50 forms in the backend. Even with no submissions, new form submissions slow down after we reimport those forms.

When we get to over 5,000 submissions, an underpowered server freezes up with just a 300MB+ database when a visitor submits a form. The issue mainly happens when writing to the database, and the query monitor isn’t much help (or maybe I’m not using it correctly).

I understand that moving to AWS makes the database perform much faster, and submissions are very quick. However, this seems to be an architecture or database design issue that should be addressed fundamentally. Changing the implementation will help Ninja Forms perform faster as well.

I understand. You can always contact Ninja Forms Customer Success team about your concerns. They’re super helpful and eager to dig into this with you. Plus, reporting these issues to them helps them keep track and work on fixes that benefit not only you but everyone else who might run into the same snag. So, don’t hesitate to give them a shoutout!