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 Plugins

As soon as you edit and save a post/page, WordPress begins to store revisions of your content in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions section at the bottom of the content editor …

(Post revisions list – Post Editor screen)

For most users, having features like autosave and revisions is something that can help make work more efficient. If you write a lot of content, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

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

For example, if there are 200 posts on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions your database could be storing around 4,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 4,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 400MB.

Fortunately, there are a few great plugins that can 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 WP Plugin)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your database as well as other database content belonging to each revision like meta data, tags, relationships, and more.

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

Go to your WP Dashboard and choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions belonging to each post, the plugin returns a table of revisions stored in your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – List of post revisions)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button to delete all list items from your database, or select the ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ button to cancel the operation and exit the page …

(Clear list of revisions)

The unnecessary post information will be deleted from your WP database …

(Revisions cleared – Better Delete Revision)

After a while, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin saving your revisions again …

(WordPress automatically begins storing all new post revisions again!)

You can also use the plugin to optimize the WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Keep your WordPress database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database tables need to be optimized and provides an easy one-click WP database table optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your hosting control panel or use complicated database management tools …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision WordPress Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

OptimizeDatabase not only lets you remove redundant post and page revisions (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click table cleaning and optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you perform optional maintenance tasks such as:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Panel)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize WordPress Plugin)

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

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• Receive email notifications after automatic cleanup
• Highlights dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize 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
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned term relationships
• Duplicated post meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP-Sweep Plugin – Settings)

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 WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “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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