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 Using Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and save posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions section at the bottom of the post editor …

(Post Editor section – Viewing the revisions list)

Having access to content workflow features like autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt very useful. If you write and edit extensively, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 200 posts on your site and each post has 10 revisions your database could be storing an extra 2,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 200MB.

The good news is that there are a few great WordPress plugins available that can help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and other database content associated with each revision like tags, meta data, relationships, and more.

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

Go to the WP admin section and choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WP Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions belonging to each post, the plugin display a table of revisions stored in the WordPress database …

(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to remove all list items from your WordPress database …

(Delete posts revisions list)

The redundant data will be cleared from your WP database …

(Post revisions list deleted – Better Delete Revision Manager)

After a period of time and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site and their related post revisions, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin saving all post revisions again …

(WordPress will automatically begin saving all revisions again!)

You can also use the plugin to keep the database optimized …

(Optimize the WP database – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WP database tables need optimization and lets you run an easy one-click table optimization routine without requiring you to log into your hosting panel or use technical database management tools …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you delete redundant revisions of pages and posts (with the added option of keeping a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following optional tasks:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude specific posts/pages and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress – Settings Panel)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize WP Plugin)

In addition to cleaning unnecessary post and page revisions and performing WordPress database optimization maintenance, this plugin also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Removal of all transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• Display database table statistics
• Receive email notifications after scheduled cleanups
• Highlights dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings Page)

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

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WP Sweep Plugin – Settings)

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

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 WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New Plugin)

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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