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 Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and save your pages/posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions section at the bottom of the post editor …

(WordPress revisions box – Post Editor screen)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more efficient. If you write or edit extensively, however, over time 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 there are 100 posts on your site and each post has 15 revisions you could be storing an extra 1,500 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,500 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 150MB.

The good news is that there are various free plugins for WordPress that can 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 – WordPress Plugin)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant post revisions from your database as well as database content related to each revision like relationships, tags, meta data, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can use the plugin to optimize your database.

Log into your WordPress admin section, then go to the admin navigation menu and click on click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WP Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of post revisions)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Delete list of revisions)

The unnecessary items will be deleted from your WordPress database …

(Revisions deleted – Better Delete Revision)

After a period of time, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to save your new revisions again …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

Like the other plugins described in this section, you can also use this plugin to optimize your site’s database …

(Optimize your database – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The plugin checks to see if the database needs to be optimized and provides a one-click optimization feature that does not require you to log into your hosting control panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the database needs optimization)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you prune redundant page and post revisions (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings Page)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning redundant revisions of pages and posts and performing database optimization routines, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of stale metadata from 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
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• Receive email notifications on automatic cleanups
• Displays dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep WordPress Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphan term meta
• Duplicated post meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP Sweep WordPress 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

In addition to the above plugins, you can view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Manage Post 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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