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 edit and save a page/post, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions box at the bottom of the content editor …

(Post Editor screen – View the WordPress post revisions box)

For most users, having autosave and automatic revisions is a great thing. If you write extensively, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

(As you write more posts on your site, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if there are 250 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing an extra 2,500 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,500 revisions, the total space wasted is about 250MB.

Fortunately, there are various free WordPress plugins to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

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

After installing and activating the plugin, Better Delete Revision can perform optimizations on your database.

In your Dashboard, select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Settings)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

A list of post revisions stored in the database will display on the screen …

(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ below the list to remove all items from your WP database, or abandon the operation and exit the page with your post revisions undeleted …

(Delete list of post revisions)

The unnecessary revisions will be deleted from the WordPress database …

(List of post revisions deleted)

As WordPress automatically saves all revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you have turned the feature off). After some time has passed and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website and their associated post revisions, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start being stored again!)

Like the other plugins listed in this section, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep your site’s database optimized …

(Better Delete Revision – Keep the database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database needs to be optimized and provides an easy one-click optimization routine without requiring you to log into your server panel or mess with technical database management software …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)

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

• Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude certain posts/pages and tables from cleaning and 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-Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to performing tasks such as removing unnecessary page and post revisions and checking if your WordPress database needs optimization, this plugin also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Remove stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Remove all transient options
• Clear out post trash
• 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
• Display database table statistics
• E-mail notifications on automatic cleanups
• Displays 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 Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphan user meta
• Duplicated user meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP-Sweep – Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep WP 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 type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, 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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