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 Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you save your posts/pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions for your content in its database. These appear in a Revisions section below your page editor …

(Post Editor screen – The WordPress revisions list)

For most users, having autosave and automatic revisions is something that contributes to making work more efficient. 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 manage your revisions.

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

For example, if you have 10 posts on your site with an average of 5 revisions each you could be storing around 500 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 500 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 50MB.

The good news is that there are several free plugins for WordPress available to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your database as well as other database content belonging to each revision such as tags, meta information, relationships, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use it to optimize your database without having to log into your server.

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

(Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate how many redundant post revisions you can safely remove from your WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

A list of post revisions stored in your database will display on the screen …

(Posts revisions)

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

(Delete posts revisions)

The unnecessary post revisions will be cleared from the WordPress database …

(List of post revisions deleted – Better Delete Revision Manager)

As WordPress automatically saves all revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you have turned the feature off). After some time has passed, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WordPress database as lean as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep your site’s database optimized …

(Keep the WordPress database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if your WP database tables need optimization and lets you run an easy one-click optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your server control panel or mess with technical software …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click table optimization maintenance routine)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only lets you remove unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if the WordPress database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, it also lets you perform the following optional tasks:

• Delete trashed comments, posts, and pages
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude certain tables or even specific posts/pages from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting unnecessary post and page revisions and checking if the database tables need cleaning and optimization, this plugin also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Removal of all transient options
• 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 after scheduled cleanups
• Marks dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved 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 WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Add New Plugin – 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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