Optimize your custom fields
Custom fields can have a huge impact on the performance of your Jira instance. You can decrease this impact and speed up your Jira by improving the configuration of your custom fields. With custom field optimization in Jira, you can do it automatically.
For all of the following procedures, you must be logged in as a user with Jira administrator permissions. For details, see Permissions overview.
Identify custom fields that need optimization
Scan your custom fields to find and highlight those whose configuration can be optimized. The scan will exclude any custom fields created automatically by Jira Software and Jira Service Management.
- In the upper-right corner of your Jira application, select Jira administration, and then select System.
In the sidebar, navigate to Instance optimizer and select Optimize custom fields.
Select Scan. Depending on the size of your instance, it might take some time. Just leave it running and come back later.
View scan results
When the scan is complete, it'll show you why custom fields were highlighted and how many of them can be optimized. 
Scan: Action to start the scan, or to run it again.
Recommendation: Shows why custom fields are highlighted, and tells you how many fields can be optimized.
Manage global fields: Takes you to the page with highlighted custom fields, where you can optimize them.
Recommendations for optimizing custom fields
Before cleaning up your custom fields, review these best practices to ensure you remove only redundant fields and don’t break any existing configurations.
Remove duplicate fields and reuse existing ones
Review your custom fields to identify duplicates. For example, you may find fields like “Start Date”, “Started date”, or “Date of Start”. Remove duplicates and reuse a single field across projects to reduce clutter and improve consistency
Review field configurations
Some custom fields take much more time to index than others. If it’s not a system field, you might try to improve its configuration to make it index faster, or delete the field if it’s not essential for your organization.
You can find the information about the field’s indexing time on the Custom field indexing page, which displays the 20 most time-consuming custom fields. How to identify fields that take the longest to index
Review workflows before deleting a field
If you have a workflow that sets a field value, deleting the field can break transitions or automations. Update or remove those references first. How to manage your workflows
Review the custom field contexts
Context is a part of a custom field configuration. If a field has a global context assigned, it’s used in all projects in Jira, which has a significant impact on the index.
It might happen that a certain custom field is used only by several projects, and a global context is not necessary. In this case, we recommend setting a project-specific context instead. More on updating custom field contexts
Check the usage of custom fields
Check the usage data for your custom fields—how many issues are actually using your fields, and when was the last value update. This data is displayed for every custom field and should help you identify fields that haven't been used for a long time. For more information, refer to Analyzing the usage of custom fields.
Custom fields and archived issues
Archived issues are deleted from the Jira index. Due to this, the custom fields optimization feature doesn’t have complete information about the issues that use a particular custom field.
This can result in some unwanted behavior, such as custom fields not displaying for archived issues and for the issues that have been restored. For more information, refer to our knowledge base article Custom field optimizer and archived issues.