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 pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions list below the content editor …

(Post Editor screen – View the WordPress post revisions box)

Having autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt a great thing. If you write and edit often, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(As post revisions accumulate, your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if there are 100 posts on your site and each post has 20 revisions your WordPress database could be storing an extra 2,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 200MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant post revisions from your database as well as other revision-related content like meta data, relationships, tags, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use the Better Delete Revision Manager to perform optimizations on your database without having to log into your server.

Log into the WP admin area and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings Menu)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager screen. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate how many redundant post revisions can be safely deleted from your database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions related to each post, the plugin returns a list of post revisions stored in the database …

(List of revisions)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to clear all items from your database, or exit the tool with all post revisions undeleted …

(Clear posts revisions – Better Delete Revision)

The redundant post revisions will be deleted from the database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Post revisions deleted)

After some time has passed and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to save your revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …

(Revisions automatically start being saved again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize the database …

(Keep the database optimized – Better Delete Revision)

The plugin checks to see if your database tables need to be optimized and provides an easy one-click table optimization feature without the need to log into your server control panel …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click database optimization routine)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you delete unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (with the option to keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if the WordPress database needs cleaning and optimization, it also lets you do the following optional tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude certain tables and specific posts/pages from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

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

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to removing redundant revisions of pages and posts and checking if the database tables need to be optimized, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• 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 schedules
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• E-mail notifications on scheduled database cleanup
• Marks dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – Settings)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin)

In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary post revisions, this plugin also cleans up:

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphan post meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP-Sweep WP Plugin – 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

In addition to the above plugins, you can view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New Plugins)

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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