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.

Managing Content Revisions Using Plugins

As soon as you edit and save a page or post, 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 section – The WordPress revisions box)

For most users, having autosave and automatic revisions is a great thing. If you write and edit often, however, over time the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly bloat 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 there are 100 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing around 1,500 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,500 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 150MB.

The good news is that there are a number of free WordPress plugins to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant revisions of posts from your database as well as other revision-related content like meta data, relationships, tags, and more.

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

In the WordPress Dashboard, choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate how many redundant post revisions can be deleted from the database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions belonging to each post, the plugin displays a list of post revisions stored in the database …

(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Clear list of post revisions)

The unnecessary revisions will be removed from your WP database …

(List of post revisions removed – Better Delete Revision)

After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins to store post revisions again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off) …

(WordPress automatically begins to store your new revisions again!)

Like the other plugins described further below, you can also use the plugin to keep the site’s database optimized …

(Optimize your site’s database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database needs optimization and performs a one-click table optimization routine without requiring you to log into your hosting control panel or use technical tools …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click database table optimization routine)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you remove unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (with the option of keeping an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if your WP database tables need to be optimized, it also lets you perform the following optional maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed comments, posts, and pages
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• Exclude selected posts/pages and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize WP Plugin)

In addition to cleaning unnecessary post and page revisions and checking if your WP database tables need optimization, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of spam comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• View database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after scheduled cleanup
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize WP Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep)

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

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphaned user meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP Sweep – WordPress Plugin Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep

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 WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Post Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Add Plugin – 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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