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 Post Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you edit and save a post/page, WordPress begins to store revisions of the content in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions list at the bottom of the content editor …

(Post Editor screen – The WordPress post revisions box)

Having access to functions like autosave and automatic revisions is undoubtedly a great thing. If you write or edit extensively, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

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

For example, if there are 200 posts on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions your database could be storing an extra 4,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 4,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 400MB.

Fortunately, there are various WordPress plugins available to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Let’s take a look at a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

This plugin deletes redundant revisions of posts from your database and other revision-related content such as tags, relationships, meta data, and more.

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

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

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be deleted from the WP database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post entry, the plugin returns a list of revisions stored in your WordPress database …

(List of post revisions)

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

(Delete list of post revisions)

The unnecessary items will be deleted from your database …

(Better Delete Revision – Post revisions deleted)

After a period of time, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin saving all new post revisions again …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

You can also use this plugin to optimize your WordPress database …

(Optimize your database – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The plugin checks to see if the WordPress database needs optimization and runs an easy one-click database table optimization routine that does not require you to log into your server panel or mess with complicated software …

(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)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you remove unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if your database tables need to be optimized, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to deleting unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and checking if your WP database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, WP Optimize also lets you perform database maintenance tasks such as:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Remove stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all transient options
• Clear out the 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 scheduling
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications after scheduled cleanup
• Highlights dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep WP Plugin)

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

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

(WPSweep – WordPress Plugin 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 WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, 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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