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 update a post/page, WordPress begins to store revisions for the content in its database. These appear in a Revisions box below the post editor …

(The revisions list)

Having autosave and revisions is no doubt a timesaver. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, over time 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.

(Your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if there are 300 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing around 6,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 6,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 600MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

This plugin removes redundant post revisions from your database and database content associated with each revision such as relationships, tags, meta data, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can optimize your database.

In the main menu of your admin area, select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WordPress Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post entry, the plugin calculates and returns a table of post revisions stored in your WP database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – List of revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ below the list to clear the items from the WordPress database, or select ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to abandon the process and exit the Better Delete Revision settings screen …

(Delete list of post revisions)

The redundant items will be cleared from the database …

(Revisions list removed)

As WordPress automatically saves all revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you have turned the feature off). After a period of time and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website and their associated post revisions, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible …

(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the WordPress database optimized …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Keep the WP database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if your database tables need optimization and runs an easy one-click optimization routine that does not require you to log into your server panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

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

• Delete trashed comments, posts, and pages
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude certain tables and specific pages/posts from optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to performing tasks such as removing redundant revisions of posts and pages and performing database cleaning and optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove stale spam comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• E-mail notifications on scheduled database cleanup
• Highlights dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings Screen)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WP Sweep Plugin – Settings Page)

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

For 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“, etc …

(Add 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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