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 create, edit, and save pages and posts, WordPress begins to store revisions for your content in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions list at the bottom of the page editor …

(Revisions list)

Having access to effective workflow features like autosave and revisions is no doubt very useful. If you write a lot of content, however, over time the revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow 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 50 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each you could be storing up to 1,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 100MB.

The good news is that there are a number of free plugins for WordPress that can help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WordPress Plugin)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant revisions of posts from your database as well as other database content related to each revision like relationships, tags, meta information, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, the plugin can optimize your database.

Log into your WordPress site, then go to your navigation menu and select click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings Menu)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate how many redundant post revisions can be safely deleted from the WP database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions belonging to each post, the plugin will then calculate and display a list of post revisions stored in your database …

(List of revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ below the list to delete all items from your database, or select the ‘No, …’ button to exit the page …

(Remove posts revisions)

The unnecessary items will be removed from the WP database …

(Better Delete Revision – Revisions list removed)

As WordPress automatically stores your post revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you specifically turn the feature off). After a period of time and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site and their related post revisions, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible …

(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)

Like the other plugins listed in this section, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep your WordPress database optimized …

(Keep your site’s database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your WP database tables need to be optimized and provides an easy one-click optimization maintenance routine without the need to log into your hosting control panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision WP Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you delete redundant revisions of posts and pages (with the added option of keeping a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you do the following optional maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude specific posts/pages and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Panel)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to cleaning unnecessary revisions of posts and pages and checking if your WP database needs optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove transient options
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data 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
• E-mail notifications on automatic cleanups
• Displays dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize WP Plugin – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep)

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

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

(WP-Sweep Plugin – Settings)

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

For more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(Add New Plugins – WordPress 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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