WordPress Plugins For Managing WordPress Post Revisions

In a separate tutorial, we looked at the WordPress Post Revisions feature, where WordPress saves all your post revisions, so you can always go back to an earlier version of what you have written and restore it.

In this tutorial, we look at a number of WordPress plugins that will help you manage your post revisions.

Revision Management Plugins

As soon as you save a post or page, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions list at the bottom of the page or post …

(Post Editor screen – Viewing the revisions list)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help create a more effective workflow. If you write a lot of content, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(As post revisions accumulate, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if there are 10 posts on your site and each post has an average of 5 revisions your WordPress database could be storing an extra 500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 500 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 50MB.

The good news is that there are some really great free plugins that can help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Let’s take a look at a few of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

This plugin removes redundant revisions of posts from your database and database content associated with each revision such as meta data, tags, relationships, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use it to perform optimizations on your database.

Log into your WP Dashboard and choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings – Better Delete Revision)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions you can safely remove from your WP database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions associated with each post, the plugin calculates and returns a list of revisions stored in your WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision – Posts revisions list)

Click on the button below the list to delete the items from your WordPress database …

(Clear list of post revisions)

The unnecessary items will be deleted from the database …

(Post revisions list deleted)

After a period of time and depending on the amount of content you have published on your site, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin saving your new post revisions again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off) …

(WordPress automatically begins storing your new post revisions again!)

Like the other plugins described in this section, you can also use the plugin to optimize your database …

(Better Delete Revision – Keep the database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your WP database tables need optimization and provides an easy one-click WordPress database table optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your hosting panel or use complicated database management applications …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your WP database tables need optimization)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision WordPress Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you prune redundant post and page revisions (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you perform database maintenance tasks like:

• Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude specific posts/pages and tables from optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to cleaning unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and performing optimization routines, WP Optimize also lets you perform database maintenance tasks such as:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Remove trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications after automatic cleanups
• Marks dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize WordPress Plugin – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin)

WP Sweep lets you clean up duplicated, unused, and orphaned data in your database, including post revisions. This plugin cleans up:

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphan post meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin

Simple Revisions Delete

This lightweight and simple-to-use plugin lets you purge (delete) your posts revisions either individually or all at once.

Once the plugin has been installed and activated, for example, a ‘Purge’ link appears next to the Revisions section in your Publish box (and in other sections of your admin area) allowing you to safely delete revisions.

For more details, go here: Simple Revisions Delete

WP REVISIONS CONTROL

This plugin lets you specify the number of revisions retained for each post type in the Settings > Writing screen.

For more details, go here: WP Revisions Control

In addition to the above plugins, you can view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Add Plugins – Plugins Menu)

We hope that you have found the above information on plugins that will help you manage your WordPress post revisions useful.

***

***