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 Post Revisions – WordPress 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 box below the page editor …

(Post Editor section – Viewing the Post revisions box)

Having autosave and automatic revisions is undoubtedly a great thing. If you write a lot of content, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

(Your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 200 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing up to 3,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 3,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 300MB.

Fortunately, there are several free WordPress plugins available to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WordPress Plugin)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and database content related to each revision such as tags, relationships, meta information, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, Better Delete Revision can optimize your database.

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

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Settings)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Posts revisions list)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ below the list to remove all items from the WP database, or cancel the process and exit the Better Delete Revision Manager screen …

(Better Delete Revision – Clear list of revisions)

The unnecessary items will be cleared from the database …

(Post revisions removed)

As WordPress automatically stores your new post revisions, the process will automatically start again. After a period of time and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as light as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your site’s database …

(Keep your WordPress database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if the database tables need to be optimized and provides a one-click optimization routine that does not require you to log into your hosting panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the WP database needs to be optimized)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

The Optimize Database plugin not only can be used to delete unnecessary page and post revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click table cleaning and optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you do the following optional tasks:

• Delete trashed comments, pages, and posts
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude specific posts/pages and tables from optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting redundant page and post revisions and performing WordPress database table cleaning and optimization routines, WP Optimize also lets you do database maintenance tasks such as:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of spam comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• 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 optimization schedules
• View database table statistics
• E-mail notifications on automatic cleanup
• Displays dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings Page)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin)

In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary revisions, WP-Sweep also cleans up:

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned term meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings Panel)

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

(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.

***

***