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 Using Plugins

As soon as you edit and save your pages/posts, WordPress begins to store revisions for the content in its database. These show up in a Revisions list below the page editor …

(Revisions list)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help create a more effective workflow. If you write or edit extensively, however, after a while the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow 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 there are 100 posts published on your site and each post has 20 revisions you could be storing around 2,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 200MB.

The good news is that there are various plugins available that can help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your database as well as other database content belonging to each revision such as meta data, relationships, tags, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, the plugin can perform optimizations on your database without having to log into your server.

In the main menu section of your Dashboard, select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WordPress Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

A list of revisions stored in your WordPress database will be returned on the screen …

(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to clear all list items from the database, or abandon the task and exit the tool with all post revisions undeleted …

(Delete posts revisions list)

The unnecessary post information will be cleared from your database …

(Revisions list deleted – Better Delete Revision)

As WordPress automatically saves post revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you have turned the feature off). After a period of time, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins to store your new revisions again!)

You can also use this plugin to keep your database optimized …

(Better Delete Revision – Keep your site’s database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if your database tables need optimization and lets you perform an easy one-click table optimization maintenance routine that does not require you to log into your hosting panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your database needs optimization)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you delete redundant post and page revisions (with the option to keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click table cleaning and optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you perform maintenance tasks like:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude certain pages/posts and tables from optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting unnecessary page and post revisions and performing database table cleaning and optimization maintenance, this plugin also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Removal of unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Remove transient options
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• Receive email notifications after scheduled database cleanups
• Highlights dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

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 your database, including revisions. This plugin cleans up:

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphaned post meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP-Sweep 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

To view 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“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(Add Plugins – 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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