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 Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you edit and update your pages/posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions list at the bottom of your post editor …

(Post Editor screen – View the Revisions list)

For most WordPress users, having autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt something that can help make work more efficient. If you write or edit a lot of content, however, 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.

(As post revisions accumulate, your 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 an extra 4,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 4,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 400MB.

Fortunately, there are various free plugins for WordPress to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Let’s take a look at a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WordPress Plugin)

This plugin removes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and other database content related to each revision such as meta information, tags, relationships, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use the Better Delete Revision Manager to perform optimizations on your database.

In the main menu of your administration area, choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WordPress Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of post revisions)

Click on the button below the list to delete all items from your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Delete posts revisions)

The redundant revisions will be removed from the WP database …

(Revisions list deleted – Better Delete Revision Manager)

After some time has passed, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to save your post revisions again …

(WordPress automatically begins saving post revisions again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use the plugin to optimize the WP database …

(Keep your database optimized – Better Delete Revision)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WP database needs to be optimized and performs a one-click table optimization routine without requiring you to log into your server panel or use complicated applications …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your 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 post and page revisions (with the option of keeping 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:

• Delete trashed comments, posts, and pages
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude specific posts/pages and tables from optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin)

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

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Remove spam comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep 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 on scheduled cleanups
• Marks dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphaned user meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP Sweep WP Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep

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 type in keywords like “Manage Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(Plugins Menu – Add Plugin)

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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