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.

Revision Management Plugins

As soon as you update posts and pages, WordPress begins to store revisions for your content in its database. These show up in a Revisions section below the post editor …

(WordPress revisions box – Post Editor screen)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more efficient. If you write or edit a lot of content, 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 WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if there are 200 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each you could be storing an extra 3,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 3,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 300MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

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

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

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

(Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Posts revisions list)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to remove the items from the database, or select the ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ button to exit the tool …

(Delete posts revisions list)

The unnecessary post revisions will be cleared from the WordPress database …

(Post revisions list removed)

As WordPress automatically stores your post revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you specifically turn the feature off). After a while, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WordPress database as light as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins storing all revisions again!)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Keep the WordPress database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if your database tables need optimization and provides an easy one-click optimization feature without the need to log into your hosting panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your database needs optimization)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only lets you remove redundant revisions of pages and posts (with the option to keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if your database needs cleaning and optimization, it also lets you perform optional maintenance tasks like:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize WordPress Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting redundant revisions of pages and posts and performing table cleaning and optimization maintenance routines, this plugin also lets you perform database maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove spam comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove transient options
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• Display database table statistics
• E-mail notifications on scheduled cleanups
• Marks 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)

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

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

(WP-Sweep WordPress Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep 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

To view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Manage Post Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Add New – 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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