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 save your pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions list at the bottom of the content editor …

(Post Editor screen – The revisions list)

For most users, having autosave and automatic revisions is undoubtedly a great thing. If you write or edit often, however, after a while the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

(Your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

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

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and database content related to each revision such as meta information, relationships, tags, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can use the plugin to perform optimizations on your WordPress 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 screen. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be safely deleted from the database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(List of post revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to delete all list items from the database, or choose the ‘No, …’ button to abandon the task and exit the Better Delete Revision screen …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Remove list of revisions)

The redundant items will be cleared from the database …

(Revisions list removed)

As WordPress automatically stores your new post revisions, the process will automatically start again. After some time has passed and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as light as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins saving all new post revisions again!)

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

(Keep the WordPress database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database needs optimization and runs a one-click optimization routine that does not require you to log into your hosting panel or use complicated database management applications …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the WordPress database needs optimization)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

The Optimize Database plugin not only can be used to remove redundant revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you do optional maintenance tasks such as:

• Delete trashed comments, pages, and posts
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude certain posts/pages and tables from optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings Page)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to deleting unnecessary page and post revisions and checking if your database tables need cleaning and optimization, WP Optimize also lets you perform database maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Removal of 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 optimization scheduling
• See database table statistics
• Receive email notifications after automatic database cleanups
• Highlights dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WP Sweep – 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 WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Post Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New 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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