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 save posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions of the content in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions box below your content editor …

(The WordPress revisions list – Post Editor section)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help make work more productive. If you write often, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow 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 50 posts on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions you could be storing up to 1,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 100MB.

Fortunately, there are some really great (and free) WordPress plugins available to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WP Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and other database content associated with each revision such as tags, relationships, meta information, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, Better Delete Revision can perform optimizations on your WP database.

In the WordPress Dashboard menu, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Settings)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be safely deleted from the WordPress database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

A table of revisions stored in the WP database will display on the screen …

(Posts revisions – Better Delete Revision)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to remove the items from the database, or abandon the process and exit the page …

(Delete posts revisions)

The unnecessary data will be removed from the WP database …

(List of revisions deleted)

After a period of time, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin storing your new revisions again …

(WordPress automatically begins storing all revisions again!)

Like the other plugins described further below, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your site’s database …

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

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your WordPress database needs optimization and performs an easy one-click table optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your hosting panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your WordPress 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 Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you prune redundant page and post revisions (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click cleaning and optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin – Settings Panel)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

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

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• 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 scheduling
• View database table statistics
• Receive email notifications after automatic cleanups
• Displays dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize WP Plugin – Settings Panel)

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

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep WP Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphaned term relationships
• Duplicated post meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WPSweep WordPress Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

To view 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“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(Add Plugins – Plugins Menu)

We hope that you have found the above information on plugins that will help you manage your WordPress post revisions useful.

***

***