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 WordPress Plugins
As soon as you create, edit, and save pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions section at the bottom of the post editor …

(WordPress revisions list)
Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help make work more efficient. If you write or edit extensively, however, after a while the 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 you have 10 posts on your site and each post has an average of 5 revisions you could be storing an extra 500 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 500 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 50MB.
The good news is that there are some really great (and free) WordPress plugins available that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Let’s take a look at some of these:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision WP Plugin)
Better Delete Revision removes redundant post revisions from your database and other database content associated with each revision such as meta data, tags, relationships, 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.
Go to your admin section and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WP Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)
This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be deleted from the database …

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)
Depending on the number of posts and revisions related to each post entry, the plugin returns a list of post revisions stored in your database …

(Better Delete Revision – List of revisions)
Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button to clear all list items from your database …

(Delete list of post revisions)
The redundant post revisions will be deleted from your database …

(Revisions deleted)
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After a period of time and depending on the amount of content you have published on your site and their related post revisions, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins saving all new post revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …

(WordPress will automatically begin saving all post revisions again!)
You can also use the plugin to keep your site’s database optimized …

(Better Delete Revision – Optimize your WP database)
The plugin checks to see if your database tables need to be optimized and provides an easy one-click optimization function that does not require you to log into your server panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your database needs optimization)
For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)
The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you delete unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (with the added option to keep an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:
- Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
- Delete spammed comments
- Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
- Exclude selected tables and specific pages/posts from cleaning and optimization
- Create a log file of the optimizations
- And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings Screen)
For more details, go here: Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin
WP Optimize
(WP Optimize Plugin)
In addition to removing unnecessary page and post revisions and checking if your database tables need to be optimized, this plugin also lets you do maintenance tasks like:
- Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
- Remove spam comments
- Mobile device friendly
- Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
- Clean up auto draft posts
- Ability to keep 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 can be optimized
- Receive email notifications after scheduled cleanup
- Displays dangerous cleanup items in red
- And more!

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings Screen)
For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin
WP-Sweep
(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress)
WP-Sweep allows you to clean up duplicated, unused, and orphaned data in the WordPress database, including post revisions. This plugin cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Deleted comments
- Orphaned term meta
- Duplicated term meta
- Transient options
- And more!

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin Settings Page)
For more details, go here: WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress
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 “Post Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, 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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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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