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 posts and pages, WordPress begins to store revisions for your content in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions box below the page editor …
(Revisions list – Post Editor screen)
For most WordPress users, having autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt something that helps make work more efficient. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, after a while the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase 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 there are 10 posts published on your site with an average of 5 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing around 500 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 500 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 50MB.
Fortunately, there are several free plugins available that can help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)
Better Delete Revision deletes redundant post revisions from your database as well as database content related to each revision such as relationships, meta information, tags, and more.
After installing and activating the plugin, you can use it to perform optimizations on your database.
Log into your WordPress dashboard, then go to the admin navigation menu and click on choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …
(Settings – Better Delete Revision)
This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager screen. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be safely deleted from your database …
(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)
A list of revisions stored in your database will display on the screen …
(List of revisions)
Click on the button below the list to clear the items from the database …
(Better Delete Revision Manager – Clear posts revisions)
The redundant data will be deleted from your database …
(Revisions list removed – Better Delete Revision)
As WordPress automatically stores your post revisions, the process will automatically begin again. After a while and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WordPress database as light as possible …
(WordPress automatically begins storing all revisions again!)
You can also use the plugin to keep your WP database optimized …
(Keep your WordPress database optimized)
The plugin checks to see if the WordPress database needs to be optimized and performs a one-click database table optimization routine without the need to log into your hosting panel …
(Better Delete Revision checks if your WP database tables need to be optimized)
For more details, go here}:
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)
This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you prune unnecessary page and post revisions (with the added option to keep an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if the WordPress database needs to be optimized, it also lets you do the following:
- Delete trashed comments, pages, and posts
- Delete unused tags
- Delete ‘expired transients’
- Exclude certain tables and/or specific posts/pages from optimization
- Automatically schedule optimizations
- And more!
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin – Settings Screen)
For more details, go here}:
WP Optimize
(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin)
In addition to removing unnecessary revisions of posts and pages and performing WP database table optimization maintenance, this plugin also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:
- Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
- Remove akismet metadata from comments
- Mobile device friendly
- Removal of all transient options
- Clear out post trash
- Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
- Add or remove link on WP admin bar
- Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
- View database table statistics
- Receive email notifications on scheduled database cleanup
- Highlights dangerous cleanup items in red
- And more!
(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings Panel)
For more details, go here}:
WP-Sweep
(WP-Sweep)
In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary revisions, WP Sweep also cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Deleted comments
- Orphan term meta
- Duplicated post meta
- Transient options
- And more!
(WPSweep – WordPress Plugin Settings)
For more details, go here}:
In addition to the above plugins, you can view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Manage Post Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …
(Plugins Menu – Add New)
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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