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 WordPress Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and save a post or page, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions section at the bottom of the post editor …

(Post Editor screen – The Post revisions list)

For most WordPress users, having autosave and revisions is undoubtedly a timesaver. If you write and edit often, however, the number of revisions can start to build 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 there are 100 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing an extra 2,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 200MB.

Fortunately, there are several plugins available to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant revisions of posts from your database as well as other database content belonging to each revision such as relationships, tags, meta data, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, Better Delete Revision can perform optimizations on your database.

Log into your administration section and choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Settings)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Posts revisions)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to delete all items from the WordPress database, or select the ‘No, …’ button to exit the Better Delete Revision Manager settings screen …

(Better Delete Revision – Clear posts revisions list)

The unnecessary revisions will be deleted from your WP database …

(Revisions cleared – Better Delete Revision)

As WordPress automatically saves post revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you specifically turn the feature off). After a while, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as light as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins storing all post revisions again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the WordPress database optimized …

(Optimize your database)

The plugin checks to see if the database needs to be optimized and provides an easy one-click optimization feature that does not require you to log into your server control panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your WordPress database tables need optimization)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

The Optimize Database plugin not only can be used to prune unnecessary post and page revisions (with the option of keeping a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click WP database cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you do the following optional tasks:

• Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude selected pages/posts and tables from optimization
• Automatically schedule 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 deleting redundant revisions of pages and posts and performing table cleaning and optimization routines, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Remove all transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications on scheduled cleanups
• Displays dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize WP Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned comment meta
• Duplicated post meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WPSweep – WordPress Plugin 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 “Manage Post Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Add New Plugin – 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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