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.

Content Revision Management Using Plugins

As soon as you edit and save pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions for the content in its database. These show up in a Revisions section below your page editor …

(Post Editor section – Viewing the WordPress post revisions list)

For most users, having access to functions like autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt a good thing. If you write and edit often, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(As you write more posts, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 200 posts on your site and each post has an average of 10 revisions your database could be storing an extra 2,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions, the total space wasted is about 200MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

This plugin deletes redundant revisions of posts from your database and database content related to each revision such as tags, meta information, relationships, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can optimize your database without having to log into your server.

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

(Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

A list of post revisions stored in your WordPress database will be returned on the screen …

(Posts revisions)

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

(Remove posts revisions list)

The redundant post revisions will be removed from the WP database …

(Revisions list removed – Better Delete Revision)

As WordPress automatically stores post revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you have turned the feature off). After a period of time, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start being stored again!)

You can also use the plugin to keep your WordPress database optimized …

(Optimize the site’s database – Better Delete Revision)

Better Delete Revision 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 server control panel or mess with complicated software …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision WP Plugin

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 remove unnecessary page and post revisions (with the added option to keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if your database needs to be optimized, it also lets you do the following:

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

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

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to removing redundant revisions of pages and posts and performing table cleaning and optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove spam comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Removal of all transient options
• Clear out 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
• Display database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after scheduled cleanup
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep)

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

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

(WPSweep Plugin – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep

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

(Add Plugin – 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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