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 edit and update a page or post, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions section below the post editor …

(Post Editor screen – View the Revisions box)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help make work more productive. If you write a lot of content, however, after a while the 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 200 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each you could be storing around 3,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 3,000 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 300MB.

Fortunately, there are several free plugins for WordPress that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Let’s take a look at a few of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and other database content associated with each revision like tags, meta information, relationships, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can use it to optimize your WP database.

Log into your WP Dashboard and choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Posts revisions list)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to clear the items from your WP database …

(Clear posts revisions list)

The redundant post information will be removed from the WP database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – List of revisions removed)

As WordPress automatically saves your new post revisions, the process will automatically begin again. After a while, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins saving all post revisions again!)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Optimize your WordPress database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WordPress database needs to be optimized and provides a one-click optimization function that does not require you to log into your server control panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the database tables need optimization)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only can be used to remove redundant revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click table optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you do the following:

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

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

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to cleaning redundant revisions of posts and pages and checking if the WordPress database needs cleaning and optimization, this plugin also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Removal of stale spam comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• Receive email notifications on automatic cleanups
• Displays dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep WordPress Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphan user meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WPSweep – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress

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 “Revisions“, “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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