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 update your pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions of the content in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions box below your page editor …

(Post Editor section – Viewing the WordPress revisions list)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt features that help make work more productive. If you write or edit extensively, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also 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 20 revisions your WordPress database could be storing an extra 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.

The good news is that there are various free plugins to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and other revision-related content like tags, meta data, relationships, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use the Better Delete Revision Manager to optimize your WordPress database without having to log into your server.

Log into your WordPress Dashboard and select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings – 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 you can delete from your database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to delete all items from your WordPress database, or choose the ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ button to cancel the process and exit the tool with your post revisions undeleted …

(Remove list of post revisions – Better Delete Revision)

The unnecessary post revisions will be removed from your database …

(Revisions list deleted)

After some time has passed and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins to save your new post revisions again …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

Like the other plugins described further below, you can also use the plugin to keep the database optimized …

(Optimize your WordPress database – Better Delete Revision)

The plugin checks to see if your database needs optimization and provides an easy one-click optimization feature without the need to log into your server panel or use technical applications …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your database needs optimization)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you delete redundant revisions of posts and pages (with the option of keeping an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the WP database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, it also lets you perform the following:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude selected tables or even specific pages/posts from optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

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

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as removing redundant revisions of pages and posts and checking if the database tables need cleaning and optimization, this plugin also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove 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 schedules of optimization
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• E-mail notifications after automatic database cleanups
• Displays dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings)

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

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WPSweep – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep – WordPress 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

In addition to the above plugins, you can 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 “Manage Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Add Plugin – WordPress 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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