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 WordPress Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and update your posts/pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions list below the page editor …

(WordPress post revisions box)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt features that help make work more productive. If you write or edit a lot of content, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

(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 your database could be storing up to 3,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 3,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 300MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

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

After the plugin has been installed and activated, the plugin can perform optimizations on your database.

Log into the Dashboard and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions associated with each post, the plugin calculates and returns a table of revisions stored in your database …

(Posts revisions)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Remove list of revisions)

The redundant data will be deleted from your database …

(List of revisions removed – Better Delete Revision)

After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin saving all new post revisions again (unless you specifically turn the feature off) …

(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)

Like the other plugins described further below, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your WP database …

(Optimize your site’s database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your WP database tables need to be optimized and provides an easy one-click WP database table optimization feature that does not require you to log into your server control panel …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to delete unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click table cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you perform database maintenance tasks such as:

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

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

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to performing tasks such as removing redundant post and page revisions and performing table optimization maintenance routines, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Removal of all transient options
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to retain 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
• E-mail notifications after automatic database cleanups
• Displays dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep WP Plugin)

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

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

(WP-Sweep WordPress Plugin – Settings Page)

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

To view 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 …

(Plugins Menu – Add New Plugins)

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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