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 – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and save posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions list at the bottom of your post or page …

(WordPress post revisions box – Post Editor screen)

Having effective workflow functions like autosave and revisions is very useful. If you write or edit often, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

(As you write more posts, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 100 posts on your site and each post has an average of 10 revisions your WordPress database could be storing around 1,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 100MB.

The good news is that there are several free WordPress plugins to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Let’s take a look at a few of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin deletes 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 perform optimizations on your WordPress database.

Log into the WordPress administration area and choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager screen. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be safely deleted from your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(Posts revisions list)

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

(Remove list of revisions)

The redundant data will be deleted from your database …

(Post revisions list removed – Better Delete Revision)

After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website and their associated post revisions, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins storing your new revisions again …

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

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

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

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your WordPress database needs to be optimized and provides a one-click optimization function without the need to log into your server panel …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click table optimization routine)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

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 prune redundant revisions of pages and posts (with the option to keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if your database tables need to be optimized, it also lets you do optional maintenance tasks like:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude specific posts/pages and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

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

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to cleaning unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and performing table optimization routines, WP Optimize also lets you do database maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Removal of stale spam comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Removal of all transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• Receive email notifications on automatic database cleanup
• Displays dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphan 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“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Add 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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