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.
Content Revision Management Using Plugins
As soon as you create, edit, and save a post/page, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions box below your post editor …
(Post Editor screen – View the post revisions box)
Autosave and revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more efficient. If you write a lot of content, however, the revisions can start building up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.
(Post revisions can really add up after a while)
For example, if you have 50 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing around 1,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 100MB.
The good news is that there are a few great WordPress plugins available to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)
Better Delete Revision removes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and database content associated with each revision like tags, relationships, meta information, and more.
After installing and activating the plugin, you can perform optimizations on your database.
Log into the Dashboard and select Settings > Better Delete Revision …
(Settings – Better Delete Revision)
This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager screen. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions you can safely remove from your WordPress database …
(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)
A table of revisions stored in your WP database will be returned on the screen …
(Better Delete Revision – Posts revisions)
Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button to remove all list items from the database, or choose ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to abandon the task and exit the Better Delete Revision screen with your post revisions undeleted …
(Clear posts revisions list)
The unnecessary data will be cleared from the database …
(Revisions list removed)
After a period of time and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site and their associated post revisions, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins to save all post revisions again …
(WordPress will automatically begin saving your revisions again!)
Like the other plugins listed in this section, you can also use this plugin to optimize your WordPress database …
(Keep the WP database optimized)
Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database tables need optimization and performs an easy one-click table optimization maintenance routine that does not require you to log into your server panel or use complicated tools …
(Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click WordPress database optimization routine)
For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision WordPress Plugin
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress)
The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you prune unnecessary post and page revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if the database needs cleaning and optimization, it also lets you do the following:
- Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
- Delete unused tags
- Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
- Exclude certain posts/pages and tables from cleaning and optimization
- Automatically schedule optimizations
- And more!
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings)
For more details, go here: Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin
WP-Optimize
(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)
In addition to cleaning redundant revisions of pages and posts and performing cleaning and optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you do database maintenance tasks like:
- Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
- Remove spam comments
- Mobile device friendly
- Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
- 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
- Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
- E-mail notifications after automatic cleanups
- Highlights potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
- And more!
(WP-Optimize Plugin – Settings)
For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin
WP-Sweep
(WP Sweep)
WP-Sweep allows you to clean up unused, duplicated, and orphaned data in your database, including revisions. This plugin cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Unapproved comments
- Orphaned term relationships
- Duplicated term meta
- Transient options
- And more!
(WPSweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)
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
For 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 Database“, etc …
(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New 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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