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 Content Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and save posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions box below the post or page …

(Post Editor section – The WordPress revisions box)

For most WordPress users, having functions like autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt very useful. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

(Your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if there are 100 posts on your site and each post has 10 revisions your WordPress database could be storing up to 1,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,000 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 100MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin removes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and database content associated with each revision such as tags, relationships, meta information, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, the plugin can optimize your database.

Log into the WP Dashboard and select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

A list of post revisions stored in your database will be returned on the screen …

(Posts revisions)

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

(Delete list of revisions – Better Delete Revision)

The unnecessary items will be deleted from your WP database …

(List of revisions removed)

As WordPress automatically stores your revisions, the process will automatically begin again. After a period of time and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your site’s database …

(Optimize your site’s database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database needs to be optimized and provides an easy one-click database optimization maintenance routine that does not require you to log into your hosting panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you delete unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (with the option to keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if your database needs to be optimized, it also lets you do the following optional tasks:

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

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

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to deleting redundant revisions of pages and posts and performing table cleaning and optimization maintenance routines, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Remove stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Removal of all transient options
• 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
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• Receive email notifications after automatic database cleanup
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin)

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

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

(WP Sweep WP 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

For more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Manage Post Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(WordPress 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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