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 edit and update a page or post, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions box at the bottom of your post or page …

(The WordPress post revisions list – Post Editor screen)
For most WordPress users, having features like autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt a great thing. If you write or edit extensively, however, over time the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

(Your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)
For example, if there are 10 posts published on your site with an average of 5 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing up to 500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 500 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 50MB.
Fortunately, there are several plugins to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few of these:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)
Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and other revision-related content such as meta information, relationships, tags, and more.
After the plugin has been installed and activated, the plugin can optimize your WordPress database.
Log into your WordPress dashboard, then go to the admin navigation menu and click on select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings)
This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions you can delete from your WP database …

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)
Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post, the plugin return a table of post revisions stored in your database …

(Posts revisions list)
Click on the button below the list to delete all items from the database, or exit the plugin with your post revisions undeleted …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Remove list of post revisions)
The unnecessary post revisions will be removed from the database …

(Revisions removed – Better Delete Revision)
![]()
After a period of time and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website and their related post revisions, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins storing your post revisions again …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)
Like the other plugins listed in this section, you can also use this plugin to optimize the WP database …

(Keep the database optimized – Better Delete Revision)
Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database tables need optimization and provides an easy one-click table optimization routine without the need to log into your hosting panel or mess with technical database management tools …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the database needs optimization)
For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)
OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to delete redundant revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if the WP database needs optimization, it also lets you do the following:
- Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
- Delete spammed comments
- Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
- Exclude certain tables and/or specific posts/pages from optimization
- Automatically schedule optimizations
- And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Panel)
For more details, go here: Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin
WP-Optimize
(WP Optimize)
In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning redundant revisions of pages and posts and checking if the database tables need optimization, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:
- Enable/Disable comments for published posts
- Removal of unapproved comments
- Mobile device friendly
- Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
- 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.g. how much space can be optimized
- Receive email notifications on scheduled cleanup
- Marks dangerous cleanup options in red
- And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings Panel)
For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress
WP-Sweep
(WP Sweep WordPress Plugin)
In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary revisions, this plugin also cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Deleted comments
- Orphaned term relationships
- Duplicated term meta
- Unused terms
- And more!

(WP-Sweep WP 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 WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Add New – Plugins Menu)
We hope that you have found the above information on plugins that will help you manage your WordPress post revisions useful.

***
"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
***



