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.
As soon as you update your posts/pages, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions section at the bottom of your post editor …
(Viewing the revisions list)
For most users, having functions like autosave and revisions is undoubtedly something that can help make work more efficient. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, over time the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat 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 you have 100 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions your database could be storing up to 2,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 200MB.
The good news is that there are some great free plugins available to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Let’s take a look at a few:
(Better Delete Revision Plugin)
This plugin removes redundant post revisions from your database and database content associated with each revision such as meta data, tags, relationships, and more.
After the plugin has been installed and activated, the plugin can perform optimizations on your database.
Go to your Dashboard and select Settings > Better Delete Revision …
(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Settings Menu)
This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate how many redundant post revisions can be removed from the WP database …
(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)
Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post, the plugin return a list of revisions stored in the database …
(Posts revisions)
Click on the button below the list to remove the items from your database, or select ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to exit the page …
(Delete list of post revisions)
The unnecessary post revisions will be cleared from your database …
(Better Delete Revision Manager – Post revisions list deleted)
After a period of time and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website and their related post revisions, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin storing all revisions again …
(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)
Like the other plugins described in this section, you can also use the plugin to keep your database optimized …
(Optimize your WP database)
The plugin checks to see if your WordPress database tables need optimization and provides an easy one-click database table optimization maintenance routine that does not require you to log into your server panel or mess with technical database management applications …
(Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click WP database table optimization routine)
For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin)
OptimizeDatabase not only lets you remove redundant revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click table cleaning and optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you do the following optional tasks:
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin – Settings)
For more details, go here: Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin
(WP Optimize)
In addition to deleting unnecessary page and post revisions and checking if your database needs optimization, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:
(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings)
For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin
(WP Sweep WP Plugin)
WP-Sweep lets you clean up unused, duplicated, and orphaned data in your WP database, including revisions. This plugin cleans up:
(WP Sweep Plugin – Settings Panel)
For more details, go here: WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress
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
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
To view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Manage Post Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …
(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add 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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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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