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 create, edit, and update your posts/pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions section below your content editor …

(WordPress revisions list)

For most WordPress users, having access to functions like autosave and automatic revisions is undoubtedly a timesaver. If you write or edit extensively, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if you have 50 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing around 1,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 100MB.

Fortunately, there are some great plugins available that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

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

After the plugin has been installed and activated, the plugin can perform optimizations on your WP database without having to log into your server.

In the WordPress Dashboard menu, choose 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 how many redundant post revisions you can delete from your WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post entry, the plugin will then calculate and display a table of revisions stored in your WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – List of revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to delete all list items from the WordPress database, or select the ‘No, …’ button to abandon the process and exit the plugin with all post revisions undeleted …

(Better Delete Revision – Delete posts revisions list)

The unnecessary post revisions will be deleted from the database …

(List of post revisions removed)

As WordPress automatically saves your post revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you specifically turn the feature off). After a while, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start being stored again!)

You can also use the plugin to keep the WP database optimized …

(Keep the site’s database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if your database tables need optimization and provides a one-click optimization routine that does not require you to log into your server panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

The Optimize Database plugin not only can be used to delete unnecessary post and page revisions (with the added option of keeping an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the WP database needs optimization, it also lets you perform optional maintenance tasks such as:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude specific pages/posts and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

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

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• Display database table statistics
• Receive email notifications after automatic cleanup
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize

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 term meta
• Duplicated user meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WPSweep – Settings Panel)

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 search for keywords like “Manage Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add Plugin)

We hope that you have found the above information on plugins that will help you manage your WordPress post revisions useful.

***

***