WPML
Status
Resolved
Reported for
WPML Multilingual CMS 4.5.8
Resolved in
WPML Multilingual CMS 4.8.3

Overview of the issue

You may see some of the WPML tables growing too large, specifically:

  • icl_translate
  • icl_translate_job
  • icl_translation_status

This may occur if there is a lot of data in the posts and postmeta tables and you are using a page builder or the Gutenberg block editor.

You may wish to delete the old translation jobs data while keeping the current content intact, however, we do not have any method to delete these jobs. This feature is still under consideration because it carries the risk of data loss, but we have an experimental script that can delete the old jobs data.

Workaround

WPML 4.8

WPML 4.8 includes a new built‑in troubleshooting feature to help automatically clean up and optimize these WPML tables. Please follow the instructions from this page: Optimizing WPML Database Tables.

Earlier versions

If you are on an earlier version, here’s the prior workaround. Please make sure you have a complete database backup. If anything doesn’t seem to be right, there is only one option which is to restore the database. If you agree, then please proceed.
  1. Download this temporary plugin
  2. Activate the plugin provided.
  3. Visit ToolsWPML Delete jobs
  4. You will see a text area prefilled with job IDs, these are 50 suggested job IDs to delete first. These job IDs are the same that you will see in WPMLTranslation ManagementJobs. You can uncheck some job IDs in case you don’t want to touch a few pages or posts.
  5. Click Delete and wait. Once the content is deleted, you will see a new batch of 50 IDs to delete, and so on until there are no jobs for revision.
  6. Finally click on Optimize _icl_translation_status table to reduce the size of icl_translation_status table.
  7. Deactivate and remove the cleaning plugin.

All known issues →