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.

Content Revision Management Using Plugins

As soon as you update your pages/posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions box below the page editor …

(Post Editor screen – View the Post revisions box)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt features that help make work more efficient. If you write or edit often, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if you have 200 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing an extra 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.

Fortunately, there are various WordPress plugins to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database as well as other revision-related content such as tags, meta information, relationships, and more.

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

In the Dashboard, select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WP Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post entry, the plugin return a table of revisions stored in the WordPress database …

(List of post revisions – Better Delete Revision)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ below the list to remove the items from your database, or exit the tool …

(Delete list of revisions – Better Delete Revision)

The unnecessary data will be cleared from your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Revisions list removed)

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

(WordPress will automatically begin to store your new post revisions again!)

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

(Keep the database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if your database tables need optimization and performs an easy one-click WordPress database optimization routine that does not require you to log into your hosting panel …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you delete unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (with the added option of keeping an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the database needs optimization, it also lets you do database maintenance tasks like:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude certain pages/posts 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 cleaning unnecessary revisions of posts and pages and performing optimization maintenance, this plugin also lets you perform database maintenance tasks such as:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Remove transient options
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications after automatic cleanup
• Displays dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – Settings)

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
• Orphaned comment meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin Settings)

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 database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “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.

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