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.

Revision Management Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and save posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions section below your post or page …

(WordPress revisions list)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt functions that help create a more productive workflow. If you write and edit often, however, after a while the revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if you have 10 posts on your site with an average of 5 revisions each your database could be storing around 500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 500 revisions, the total space wasted is about 50MB.

The good news is that there are some great WordPress plugins available to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your database and other database content related to each revision like relationships, tags, meta data, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can perform optimizations on your WordPress database.

In the main menu of your WordPress administration area, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Posts revisions list)

Click on the button below the list to remove the items from the database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Delete posts revisions list)

The redundant post information will be deleted from your WP database …

(Revisions removed)

After a period of time, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins saving your post revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …

(WordPress will automatically begin saving all new revisions again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use the plugin to optimize your WP database …

(Optimize your site’s database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your WordPress database needs optimization and provides a one-click table optimization function without the need to log into your server control panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)

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

• Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude certain 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 Plugin For WordPress

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to deleting redundant revisions of pages and posts and checking if the WordPress database needs optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do maintenance tasks such as:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to keep 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 can be optimized
• Receive email notifications on automatic cleanups
• Highlights dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin – Settings Panel)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphan term relationships
• Duplicated post meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP Sweep Plugin – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep 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 type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Add New Plugin – WordPress 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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