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 create, edit, and save pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions list below the post or page …

(View the revisions list – Post Editor screen)

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

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 100 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing up to 1,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 100MB.

Fortunately, there are several plugins for WordPress to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your database as well as database content related to each revision such as tags, relationships, meta information, and more.

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

Log into the Dashboard and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager screen. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate how many redundant post revisions can be removed from the WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of revisions)

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

(Delete posts revisions)

The redundant items will be removed from your WP database …

(Better Delete Revision – Revisions cleared)

After some time has passed and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site and their associated post revisions, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to store your new post revisions again …

(WordPress will automatically begin storing your post revisions again!)

Like the other plugins listed in this section, you can also use the plugin to keep the site’s database optimized …

(Keep the database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if the WordPress database tables need optimization and provides an easy one-click optimization routine without requiring you to log into your hosting control panel or mess with complicated tools …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

The Optimize Database plugin not only can be used to prune unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (with the option of keeping a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if the WordPress database needs optimization, it also lets you do optional maintenance tasks like:

• Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude certain posts/pages and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin)

In addition to deleting redundant revisions of posts and pages and checking if your database tables need to be optimized, WP Optimize also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Removal of trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• 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 optimization scheduling
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• Receive email notifications on scheduled database cleanups
• Marks dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings Page)

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

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep)

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

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

(WPSweep Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress

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 …

(Plugins Menu – Add New Plugins)

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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