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

(View the WordPress post revisions list – Post Editor section)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more productive. If you write or edit a lot of content, however, the number of revisions can start building 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 200 posts published on your site and each post has 10 revisions you could be storing an extra 2,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 200MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

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

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can optimize your WP database.

Log into your WordPress dashboard, then go to your navigation menu and choose choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions related to each post, the plugin will then calculate and display a list of post revisions stored in the WP database …

(List of revisions – Better Delete Revision)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to clear all list items from your database, or exit the plugin settings screen with your post revisions undeleted …

(Delete list of revisions)

The redundant revisions will be removed from the WP database …

(Revisions removed)

After a while and depending on the amount of content you have published on your site and their associated post revisions, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins storing your new revisions again (unless you specifically turn the feature off) …

(Post revisions automatically start again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the WordPress database optimized …

(Optimize the database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WP database needs optimization and provides an easy one-click table optimization feature without the need to log into your hosting panel or use technical tools …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you remove redundant post and page revisions (with the option of keeping an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the database needs cleaning and optimization, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed comments, posts, and pages
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’orphan postmeta 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 WP Plugin – Settings Panel)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning unnecessary page and post revisions and checking if the database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, this plugin also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Removal of trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Remove transient options
• 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 schedules
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications after automatic cleanup
• Highlights dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize WordPress Plugin – Settings)

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

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep)

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

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphan term relationships
• Duplicated comment meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP Sweep WordPress Plugin – Settings Panel)

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

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