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 your pages/posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions box below the page editor …

(Post Editor screen – View the WordPress revisions box)

For most WordPress users, having functions like autosave and automatic revisions is undoubtedly a great thing. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, the revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(As you write more posts, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

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

The good news is that there are a number of plugins available to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

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

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

Log into your WordPress site, then go to the navigation menu and select choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

A table of post revisions stored in the WordPress database will be returned on the screen …

(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to remove all list items from your database, or exit the plugin with all post revisions undeleted …

(Better Delete Revision – Delete posts revisions)

The redundant data will be cleared from the WP database …

(Revisions list cleared – Better Delete Revision Manager)

As WordPress automatically stores all new post revisions, the process will automatically start again. After a period of time, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as light as possible …

(Revisions automatically start being saved again!)

Like the other plugins described further below, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your database …

(Keep the site’s database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if the WP database tables need optimization and provides a one-click table optimization maintenance routine without the need to log into your server control panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you remove redundant revisions of posts and pages (with the option of keeping an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the WordPress database tables need optimization, it also lets you do the following optional tasks:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude specific pages/posts and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings Page)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as removing unnecessary post and page revisions and checking if your database needs optimization, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• Display database table statistics
• Receive email notifications on automatic database cleanups
• Highlights potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize WordPress Plugin – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned term relationships
• Duplicated term meta
• Unused terms
• 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 database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Add New Plugins – 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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