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 Post Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you update posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions of the content in its database. These show up in a Revisions list below your page editor …

(Post Editor section – The revisions list)

For most WordPress users, having features like autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt a good thing. If you write and edit often, however, the revisions can start building up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

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

For example, if you have 300 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions you could be storing up to 6,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 6,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 600MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

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

After the plugin has been installed and activated, Better Delete Revision can optimize your WP database.

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

(Settings – Better Delete Revision)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be safely deleted from your WP 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 return a list of revisions stored in your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Posts revisions list)

Click on the button below the list to clear the items from your WP database, or abandon the process and exit the tool …

(Better Delete Revision – Clear list of post revisions)

The unnecessary revisions will be cleared from the WordPress database …

(Post revisions removed)

As WordPress automatically saves all new revisions, the process will automatically begin again. After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as lean as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins storing all new post revisions again!)

You can also use this plugin to optimize the WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision – Optimize the site’s database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database needs to be optimized and provides an easy one-click database table optimization function without requiring you to log into your server panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your database tables need to be optimized)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you remove redundant post and page revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click table optimization routine, it also lets you do optional maintenance tasks like:

• Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude certain tables and/or specific pages/posts from optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting unnecessary revisions of posts and pages and checking if the WordPress database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Removal of all transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain 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 can be optimized
• E-mail notifications after scheduled cleanups
• Highlights dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize WP Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphaned term meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP-Sweep – 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

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

(Plugins Menu – Add Plugins)

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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