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 Content Revisions Using Plugins

As soon as you save your posts/pages, WordPress begins to store revisions of your content in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions box at the bottom of the post or page …

(Post Editor section – Viewing the post revisions list)

Having access to effective workflow functions like autosave and revisions is a good thing. If you write and edit extensively, however, after a while the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase 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 there are 250 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing around 2,500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,500 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 250MB.

Fortunately, there are several free plugins to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

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

After the plugin has been installed and activated, Better Delete Revision can optimize your WordPress database.

Log into your WordPress admin section, then go to the admin navigation menu and select choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WordPress Settings – Better Delete Revision)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be safely deleted from your database …

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of revisions – Better Delete Revision)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to clear all list items from the WP database, or abandon the task and exit the Better Delete Revision Manager screen …

(Delete posts revisions list)

The unnecessary post revisions will be deleted from your WordPress database …

(Revisions list cleared – Better Delete Revision Manager)

As WordPress automatically stores your post revisions, the process will automatically start again. After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins saving all new post revisions again!)

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

(Keep your site’s database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if the WP database tables need optimization and lets you perform an easy one-click table optimization maintenance routine without the need to log into your hosting control panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you prune unnecessary page and post revisions (with the added option to keep an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if your database tables need optimization, it also lets you perform the following optional maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• Delete spammed comments
• 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 Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize WP Plugin)

In addition to removing unnecessary page and post revisions and checking if your WordPress database tables need optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Remove stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Remove all transient options
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• Receive email notifications on scheduled database cleanups
• Displays dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WP Sweep – 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

In addition to the above plugins, you can 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 “Manage Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, 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.

***

***