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/pages, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions section below the post or page …

(Viewing the post revisions box – Post Editor section)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help make work more productive. If you write or edit a lot of content, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(As you write more posts on your site, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if there are 250 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each you could be storing up to 2,500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,500 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 250MB.

The good news is that there are several plugins for WordPress to 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 WordPress Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your database and other revision-related content like tags, relationships, meta data, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, the plugin can perform optimizations on your WP database without having to log into your server.

In the Dashboard menu, choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

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 remove from your database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post, the plugin display a table of revisions stored in your database …

(Posts revisions list)

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

(Delete list of revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The unnecessary items will be removed from the WP database …

(Revisions removed)

After some time has passed and depending on the amount of content you have published on your site, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins storing all revisions again …

(Post revisions automatically start being stored again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your database …

(Optimize your database – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The plugin checks to see if the database needs to be optimized and provides a one-click database table optimization function that does not require you to log into your hosting control panel or mess with complicated database management tools …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you delete unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (with the added option of keeping an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if the WordPress database needs cleaning and optimization, it also lets you perform the following optional maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude certain posts/pages and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to removing unnecessary post and page revisions and checking if the WP database needs to be cleaned and optimized, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Removal of spam comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks 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 on automatic database cleanup
• Highlights dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings)

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

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep)

In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary post revisions, WP-Sweep also cleans up:

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

(WPSweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep

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 search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Plugins Menu – Add New Plugin)

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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