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 save a page/post, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions section below your post or page …

(Post Editor screen – The post revisions list)

For most users, having access to workflow features like autosave and revisions is undoubtedly something that contributes to making work more productive. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, after a while the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(As post revisions accumulate, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if there are 100 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each you could be storing an extra 2,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 200MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WordPress Plugin)

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

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use the Better Delete Revision Manager to optimize your WordPress database.

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

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate the number of redundant post revisions you can safely delete from your WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of post revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(Delete list of post revisions)

The redundant items will be deleted from the WP database …

(Revisions list cleared)

After a period of time, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins storing your revisions again …

(WordPress automatically begins to save post revisions again!)

Like the other plugins listed in this section, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the site’s database optimized …

(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 table optimization routine that does not require you to log into your server control panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your WordPress database needs optimization)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you remove unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if the database needs to be cleaned and optimized, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude certain tables or specific pages/posts from cleaning and 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 – WordPress Plugin

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize WordPress Plugin)

In addition to deleting unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and performing table optimization maintenance routines, this plugin also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• 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 schedules of optimization
• Display 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 WordPress Plugin

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
• Unapproved comments
• Orphan post meta
• Duplicated user meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WPSweep – 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 WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Add New Plugins – 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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