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 save your pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions list at the bottom of the content editor …

(Revisions box – Post Editor screen)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt features that help make work more efficient. If you write a lot of content, however, over time the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

(Your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 200 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each you could be storing an extra 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions, the total space wasted is about 200MB.

The good news is that there are various free plugins available to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WordPress Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and other database content associated with each revision such as tags, meta data, relationships, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can perform optimizations on your WP database without having to log into your server.

In your main menu of your administration area, select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate the number of redundant post revisions you can safely delete from the WordPress database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions related to each post entry, the plugin calculates and displays a table of revisions stored in the WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – List of post revisions)

Click on the button below the list to remove all items from your database, or choose the ‘No, …’ button to exit the tool …

(Delete list of revisions)

The redundant data will be removed from your database …

(List of revisions cleared)

As WordPress automatically saves all revisions, the process will automatically start again. After some time has passed and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize the site’s database …

(Optimize the WP database – Better Delete Revision)

The plugin checks to see if your WP database tables need optimization and lets you perform an easy one-click WordPress database table optimization routine that does not require you to log into your server panel or use complicated database management tools …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click optimization maintenance routine)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you delete unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• Exclude certain tables or even specific pages/posts from optimization
• Automatically schedule 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 cleaning redundant page and post revisions and performing optimization routines, this plugin also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Removal of all transient options
• 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 schedules of optimization
• Display database table statistics
• Receive email notifications on automatic database cleanups
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize WordPress Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphan term meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress – 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

In addition to the above plugins, you can view 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 New – 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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