What are WordPress orphaned term meta and how to clean them?
Metadata refers to the additional information provided for each taxonomy term in WordPress. This data is typically not stored in the main terms table. Sometimes, term metadata becomes orphaned, meaning it no longer belongs to any taxonomy term. These “orphaned term meta” entries are unnecessary and should be cleaned.
To clean orphaned term meta, you can either use our Advanced Database Cleaner plugin or execute the following SQL code (used by the plugin) directly via phpMyAdmin:
DELETE FROM termmeta WHERE term_id NOT IN (SELECT term_id FROM terms)