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 Using Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and save pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions box at the bottom of the page or post …

(The WordPress post revisions list – Post Editor screen)

For most users, having access to workflow features like autosave and revisions is no doubt something that helps make work more efficient. If you write or edit often, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(As you write more posts, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 100 posts on your site and each post has an average of 15 revisions your WordPress database could be storing an extra 1,500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,500 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 150MB.

Fortunately, there are some great plugins that can help you 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 WP Plugin)

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

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use it to perform optimizations on your WordPress database.

Go to your Dashboard and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WP Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions related to each post, the plugin return a list of post revisions stored in your WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision – Posts revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to remove all list items from your WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Clear posts revisions)

The redundant revisions will be deleted from the database …

(Revisions deleted – Better Delete Revision Manager)

As WordPress automatically stores your new revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you have turned the feature off). After a while, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible …

(WordPress will automatically begin storing your revisions again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your WP database …

(Optimize the WP database)

The plugin checks to see if your database needs optimization and provides an easy one-click WP database optimization feature without requiring you to log into your server control panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the 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 prune redundant page and post revisions (with the option of keeping an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the WordPress database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, it also lets you do optional maintenance tasks such as:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude selected tables or specific posts/pages 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 Plugin For WordPress

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin)

In addition to cleaning redundant post and page revisions and checking if the database needs cleaning and optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do maintenance tasks such as:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Remove stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• See database table statistics
• Receive email notifications after scheduled cleanups
• Marks dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary revisions, this plugin also cleans up:

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphan post meta
• Duplicated user meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP Sweep WordPress Plugin – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress

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 WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “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.

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