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.

Post Revision Management Using Plugins

As soon as you update your posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions of the content in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions list below the page or post …

(Post Editor screen – View the Revisions box)

Having effective workflow features like autosave and revisions is no doubt a great thing. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, the revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase 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 you have 300 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions your database could be storing an extra 6,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 6,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 600MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

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

After installing and activating the plugin, you can perform optimizations on your WP database.

Log into your WordPress site, then go to the navigation menu and choose select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(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 you can safely remove from your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(Posts revisions list)

Click on the button below the list to delete all items from the database, or choose ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to exit the page with all post revisions undeleted …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Delete posts revisions list)

The unnecessary items will be cleared from the WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Revisions list removed)

As WordPress automatically saves your revisions, the process will automatically start again. After a while, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible …

(Revisions automatically start again!)

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

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

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database tables need optimization and lets you run a one-click optimization maintenance routine that does not require you to log into your hosting panel or mess with technical database management applications …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click optimization routine)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you delete redundant page and post revisions (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if your WordPress database needs optimization, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• Exclude selected tables and specific pages/posts from optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

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

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

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

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove spam comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• See database table statistics
• Receive email notifications on scheduled database cleanup
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep WordPress Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphan comment meta
• Duplicated user meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WPSweep 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

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 “Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Add New Plugin – 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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