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 Revisions Using Plugins

As soon as you edit and save pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions list at the bottom of the post or page …

(The post revisions box)

For most users, having functions like autosave and automatic revisions is undoubtedly a timesaver. If you write or edit a lot of content, however, over time 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.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 300 posts on your site and each post has 20 revisions your database could be storing around 6,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 6,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 600MB.

The good news is that there are some great (and free) plugins available to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress 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 data, relationships, tags, and more.

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

Go to the Dashboard and choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager screen. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate how many redundant post revisions you can safely remove from your database …

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – List of revisions)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to clear the items from the WP database, or select ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to exit the tool with all post revisions undeleted …

(Delete posts revisions list)

The redundant items will be removed from your database …

(List of post revisions removed – Better Delete Revision)

After a period of time, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin storing your new post revisions again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off) …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the site’s database optimized …

(Keep the database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WordPress database tables need to be optimized and provides an easy one-click optimization routine that does not require you to log into your hosting control panel or mess with technical database management tools …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click optimization maintenance routine)

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 delete unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click database optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin)

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

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

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep)

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

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphan comment meta
• Duplicated user meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP Sweep – 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 “Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Add New 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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