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

(The WordPress revisions list – Post Editor section)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help make work more efficient. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, over time 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.

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

For example, if there are 100 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing around 1,500 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,500 revisions, the total space wasted is about 150MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant revisions of posts from your database as well as database content associated with each revision like tags, relationships, meta information, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can optimize your WordPress database without having to log into your server.

In the WP Dashboard menu, select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Settings)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Posts revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to clear all list items from the WP database, or choose ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to abandon the process and exit the plugin …

(Delete posts revisions)

The redundant data will be cleared from your WP database …

(Better Delete Revision – Revisions list cleared)

As WordPress automatically stores your new revisions, the process will automatically start 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 WordPress database as light as possible …

(Revisions automatically start being saved again!)

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

(Optimize your site’s database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database needs optimization and performs an easy one-click database table optimization routine without the need to log into your hosting panel …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you prune unnecessary page and post revisions (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if your WP database needs to be optimized, it also lets you perform the following:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude selected tables and/or specific pages/posts from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize WordPress Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as removing redundant post and page revisions and checking if the database needs to be cleaned and optimized, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Remove transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• Display database table statistics
• E-mail notifications on automatic database cleanups
• Displays dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WP-Sweep Plugin – 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

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

(Add New Plugins – 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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