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/Page Revision Management Using Plugins

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

(WordPress post revisions box)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more productive. If you write and edit often, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

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

For example, if you have 200 posts on your site and each post has 10 revisions your database could be storing up to 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 200MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin removes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database as well as other revision-related content like meta information, tags, relationships, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can perform optimizations on your database without having to log into your server.

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

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate how many redundant post revisions you can delete from the database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Posts revisions list)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Remove list of revisions)

The redundant revisions will be removed from your WP database …

(Revisions cleared – Better Delete Revision)

After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website and their associated post revisions, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to save all post revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …

(Revisions automatically start being saved again!)

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

(Keep your database optimized – Better Delete Revision)

The plugin checks to see if your database tables need to be optimized and provides a one-click optimization feature 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 Plugin For WordPress

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

OptimizeDatabase not only lets you remove redundant revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if the database needs optimization, it also lets you perform maintenance tasks like:

• Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude certain tables and/or specific pages/posts from optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin)

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

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Removal of trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Removal of all transient options
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• Display database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after automatic database cleanups
• Displays dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings Page)

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

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphan user meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP Sweep – Settings)

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 WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Manage Post Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Add New 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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