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 update posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions box at the bottom of your page or post …

(Post Editor screen – Viewing the post revisions box)

For most users, having functions like autosave and automatic revisions is a timesaver. If you write and 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 also be able to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 100 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing up to 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 a number of WordPress plugins available to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

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

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

In the Dashboard menu, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Settings)

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 removed from your database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions associated with each post, the plugin will then calculate and display a table of revisions stored in your WordPress database …

(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ below the list to delete the items from your database, or abandon the task and exit the tool with all post revisions undeleted …

(Remove list of post revisions)

The unnecessary revisions will be cleared from the WordPress database …

(Revisions list removed)

As WordPress automatically saves post revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you have turned the feature off). After a while and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start being stored again!)

Like the other plugins described in this section, you can also use the plugin to optimize the WordPress database …

(Optimize your database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your WP database tables need to be optimized and lets you perform a one-click optimization routine without the need to log into your hosting control panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress)

OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to prune redundant post and page revisions (with the option of keeping an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if the WP database needs to be optimized, it also lets you do the following:

• Delete trashed comments, pages, and posts
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude certain tables or specific posts/pages from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

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

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting unnecessary page and post revisions and performing cleaning and optimization routines, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• 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 schedules of optimization
• View database table statistics
• Receive email notifications on automatic database cleanup
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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

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

(WP Sweep Plugin – Settings Page)

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

For more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Manage Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, 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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