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 save posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions list below the page or post …

(Post Editor screen – Viewing the Post revisions box)

For most users, having features like autosave and revisions is undoubtedly a great thing. If you write often, 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 also be able to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if you have 200 posts on your site and each post has 20 revisions your WordPress database could be storing around 4,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 4,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 400MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WordPress Plugin)

This plugin removes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database as well as other revision-related content such as relationships, meta information, tags, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use the plugin to perform optimizations on your WP database without having to log into your server.

In the main menu section of your admin area, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WordPress Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

A list of revisions stored in your WP database will display on the screen …

(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to clear the items from your WP database, or select ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to exit the Better Delete Revision settings screen …

(Delete posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision)

The redundant post revisions will be removed from the WordPress database …

(Post revisions list removed – Better Delete Revision Manager)

After a period of time, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin storing your post revisions again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off) …

(WordPress automatically begins to save your post revisions again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep your site’s database optimized …

(Keep the database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WP database tables need to be optimized and performs a one-click table optimization routine without requiring you to log into your hosting panel or mess with complicated database management applications …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress)

OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to prune unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (with the added option to keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if the WP database needs optimization, it also lets you do maintenance tasks such as:

• Delete trashed comments, pages, and posts
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude specific posts/pages and tables from cleaning and 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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize WP Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning redundant revisions of posts and pages and checking if your WP database needs optimization, WP Optimize also lets you perform maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• Receive email notifications after automatic database cleanup
• Marks dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize WP Plugin – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin)

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

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

(WP-Sweep Plugin – Settings Panel)

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

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

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add Plugin)

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

***

***