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 Using Plugins

As soon as you edit and update a page or post, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions list at the bottom of your page editor …

(Viewing the WordPress post revisions box)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt features that help create a more productive workflow. If you write extensively, however, the revisions can start building 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, your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 250 posts on your site and each post has an average of 10 revisions you could be storing around 2,500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,500 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 250MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database as well as other revision-related content such as relationships, tags, meta information, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can use it to optimize your WP database.

In your Dashboard menu, 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 safely removed from your WP database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(List of revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(Remove list of revisions)

The redundant data will be deleted from the WordPress database …

(List of revisions removed – Better Delete Revision)

After some time has passed and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website and their related post revisions, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin storing your post revisions again …

(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your site’s database …

(Keep the database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if your WP database tables need optimization and provides a one-click optimization function that does not require you to log into your server control panel or mess with complicated software …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your database tables need to be optimized)

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 prune redundant post and page revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you perform maintenance tasks such as:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• Exclude selected pages/posts and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

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

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize WP Plugin)

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

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• Receive email notifications on scheduled database cleanup
• Marks dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize WP Plugin – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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

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

(WP Sweep – Settings Panel)

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

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New)

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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