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 Plugins
As soon as you update your posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions list below your post editor …
(Post Editor screen – The post revisions box)
Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help make work more efficient. If you write or edit extensively, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase 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 with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing around 4,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 4,000 revisions, the total space wasted is about 400MB.
Fortunately, there are some great plugins to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Let’s take a look at a few:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision)
Better Delete Revision removes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and other database content belonging to each revision like relationships, tags, meta information, and more.
After installing and activating the plugin, Better Delete Revision can perform optimizations on your WordPress database.
Go to the Dashboard and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …
(WP 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 delete from the database …
(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)
Depending on the number of posts and revisions associated with each post entry, the plugin returns a table of revisions stored in your database …
(List of revisions)
Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button to clear all list items from your database …
(Remove list of post revisions)
The redundant post information will be removed from your database …
(Better Delete Revision Manager – Revisions removed)
As WordPress automatically saves your new revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you have turned the feature off). After some time has passed, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as light as possible …
(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)
Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use this plugin to optimize your site’s database …
(Better Delete Revision Manager – Keep the WP database optimized)
Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database tables need optimization and provides a one-click WordPress database table optimization function without the need to log into your server panel or mess with technical applications …
(Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click table optimization routine)
For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin)
OptimizeDatabase not only lets you delete redundant revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if the WP database tables need to be trimmed, cleaned, and optimized, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:
- Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
- Delete unused tags
- Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
- Exclude certain tables and/or specific posts/pages from optimization
- Create a log file of the optimizations
- And more!
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Page)
For more details, go here: Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress
WP Optimize
(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin)
In addition to removing redundant page and post revisions and performing WP database table cleaning and optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:
- Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
- Removal of trashed comments
- Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
- Removal of all transient options
- Clean up auto draft posts
- Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
- Add or remove link on WP admin bar
- Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
- View database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
- Receive email notifications on automatic database cleanups
- Highlights dangerous cleanup items in red
- And more!
(WP-Optimize WP Plugin – Settings)
For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin
WP Sweep
(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)
In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary revisions, this plugin also cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Unapproved comments
- Orphan comment meta
- Duplicated user meta
- Transient options
- And more!
(WP-Sweep – Settings Page)
For more details, go here: WP-Sweep 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
To view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Post Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …
(Add New Plugin – 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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