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 Content Revisions – WordPress Plugins
As soon as you edit and save your posts/pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions box at the bottom of your post or page …

(View the revisions list – Post Editor screen)
Having autosave and revisions is something that helps make work more efficient. If you write and edit extensively, however, the number of revisions can start building 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 10 posts on your site with an average of 5 revisions each you could be storing up to 500 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 500 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 50MB.
The good news is that there are a number of plugins that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin removes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and other revision-related content such as meta data, tags, relationships, and more.
After the plugin has been installed and activated, Better Delete Revision can optimize your database.
Go to the Dashboard and select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)
A list of revisions stored in your WP database will be returned on the screen …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Posts revisions)
Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to delete all items from the WP database, or select ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to exit the tool with all post revisions undeleted …

(Delete list of revisions)
The unnecessary data will be deleted from the database …

(Better Delete Revision – Post revisions removed)
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As WordPress automatically saves your new post revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you specifically turn the feature off). After a while, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as lean as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins saving your post revisions again!)
You can also use this plugin to optimize the WP database …

(Keep your database optimized – Better Delete Revision)
Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database needs optimization and provides an easy one-click table optimization maintenance routine without the need to log into your server panel or mess with technical database management software …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click table optimization maintenance routine)
For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin)
The Optimize Database plugin not only can be used to prune redundant post and page revisions (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the database needs cleaning and optimization, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:
- Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
- Delete spammed comments
- Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
- 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 For WordPress – Settings)
For more details, go here: Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin
WP-Optimize
(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)
In addition to performing tasks such as removing unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and performing optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:
- Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
- Removal of stale spam comments
- Mobile device friendly
- Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
- Clear out post trash
- Ability to keep 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.g. how much space has been cleared
- E-mail notifications on scheduled cleanup
- Displays potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
- And more!

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

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin Settings)
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 database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Manage Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Plugins Menu – Add Plugins)
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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