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 edit and save a page/post, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions box at the bottom of the post or page …

(Post Editor screen – The WordPress post revisions box)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help make work more efficient. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

(Your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 200 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing up to 4,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 4,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 400MB.

The good news is that there are several plugins for WordPress that can help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

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

After installing and activating the plugin, Better Delete Revision can optimize your database without having to log into your server.

Log into your WordPress admin section, then go to the main navigation menu and choose choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

A table of post revisions stored in the database will display on the screen …

(List of revisions – Better Delete Revision)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to clear all list items from your database, or choose ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to exit the page …

(Delete posts revisions list)

The redundant post information will be cleared from the WP database …

(Revisions deleted)

After a while, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins saving all new post revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …

(WordPress will automatically begin to save all post revisions again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Optimize the site’s database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WP database needs optimization and provides a one-click database table optimization routine that does not require you to log into your server control panel or use technical software …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your database tables need to be optimized)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you prune unnecessary page and post revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if your WP database needs optimization, it also lets you do the following:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning redundant revisions of pages and posts and checking if the database tables need optimization, this plugin also lets you perform maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• View database table statistics
• Receive email notifications on automatic database cleanups
• Displays dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings)

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

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary revisions, WP Sweep also cleans up:

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphaned post meta
• Duplicated post meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP Sweep – WordPress Plugin Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep WP 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

For more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Add New Plugins – WordPress Plugins Menu)

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

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