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 a page/post, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions list at the bottom of your content editor …

(Post Editor section – Viewing the post revisions list)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt features that help make work more productive. If you write extensively, however, the revisions can start building up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also 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 and each post has 10 revisions your WordPress database could be storing an extra 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 200MB.

Fortunately, there are some really great (and free) WordPress plugins that can help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your database and other database content related to each revision like meta data, relationships, tags, and more.

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

In the main menu section of your admin area, choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Settings Menu)

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 removed from the WordPress database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – List of post revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to remove all list items from your database, or choose ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to exit the page with your post revisions undeleted …

(Clear list of post revisions – Better Delete Revision)

The unnecessary revisions will be removed from your database …

(Revisions removed – Better Delete Revision)

After a period of time, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins saving all new revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …

(WordPress automatically begins to save post revisions 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 Manager – Optimize the database)

The plugin checks to see if the database needs to be optimized and lets you run an easy one-click optimization routine that does not require you to log into your hosting panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your WordPress database tables need optimization)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you remove redundant revisions of pages and posts (with the option to keep an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if your WP database needs to be cleaned and optimized, it also lets you do the following optional tasks:

• Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude certain posts/pages and tables 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 Plugin)

In addition to cleaning unnecessary post and page revisions and checking if the WP database needs cleaning and optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• 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 optimization schedules
• Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• Receive email notifications on automatic database cleanups
• Highlights dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize WP Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WPSweep WP Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep – WordPress 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 WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Post Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Add Plugin – 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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