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 Using Plugins

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

(WordPress post revisions box – Post Editor screen)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help make work more efficient. If you write 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 you have 50 posts published on your site and each post has 20 revisions your 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 space wasted is about 100MB.

Fortunately, there are various WordPress plugins to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Let’s take a look at a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WP Plugin)

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

After the plugin has been installed and activated, the plugin can perform optimizations on your database.

Go to your WordPress Dashboard and select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WordPress Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post entry, the plugin calculates and displays a table of revisions stored in the database …

(List of revisions)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Delete posts revisions)

The redundant post information will be removed from your database …

(Revisions list deleted)

After a period of time, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins storing all revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …

(WordPress will automatically begin to save your new revisions again!)

Like the other plugins listed in this section, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Optimize your WP database)

The plugin checks to see if your database tables need optimization and provides a one-click optimization function that does not require you to log into your hosting panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the database needs to be optimized)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to delete unnecessary page and post revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if your WP database needs to be cleaned and optimized, it also lets you do the following:

• Delete trashed comments, posts, and pages
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• Exclude selected tables or even specific posts/pages from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

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

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting unnecessary page and post revisions and performing database table optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove spam comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Remove transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• Receive email notifications on automatic database cleanup
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize WordPress Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin)

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

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

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep – WordPress 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“, “Database Optimize“, 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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