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 edit and update a page or post, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions list below your post editor …

(Post Editor section – The WordPress post revisions box)

Having effective workflow features like autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt very useful. If you write or edit extensively, however, the revisions can start to build 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 you have 200 posts on your site and each post has 10 revisions your WordPress database could be storing an extra 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 200MB.

The good news is that there are a number of free WordPress plugins that can help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database as well as other revision-related content like relationships, tags, meta information, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can perform optimizations on your database.

Log into your WordPress site, then go to the admin navigation menu and click on click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions belonging to each post entry, the plugin return a table of post revisions stored in your WordPress database …

(Posts revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to delete all list items from your database …

(Delete list of revisions – Better Delete Revision)

The redundant revisions will be cleared from your WP database …

(Revisions list removed – Better Delete Revision Manager)

As WordPress automatically saves post revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you have turned the feature off). After a period of time, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as lean as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start again!)

You can also use this plugin to optimize the database …

(Optimize the database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your WP database tables need optimization and provides an easy one-click optimization maintenance routine that does not require you to log into your server control panel …

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

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 lets you prune redundant revisions of pages and posts (with the added option of keeping a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if your WordPress database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, it also lets you perform database maintenance tasks such as:

• Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude selected tables and specific pages/posts from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

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

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting unnecessary revisions of posts and pages and checking if your WP database needs to be optimized, WP Optimize also lets you do maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• 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
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• E-mail notifications after scheduled database cleanups
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize WordPress Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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!

(WP-Sweep – 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 “Manage Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(Add Plugins – WordPress 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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