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 Using Plugins

As soon as you save your pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions of your content in its database. These show up in a Revisions list below your page or post …

(View the WordPress revisions box)

Having access to effective workflow functions like autosave and revisions is no doubt a great thing. If you write or edit extensively, however, after a while the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

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

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

The good news is that there are a number of free WordPress plugins available to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress 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 and other revision-related content such as tags, meta data, relationships, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can perform optimizations on your WordPress database.

Log into your Dashboard and choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WP Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Posts revisions)

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

(Delete list of revisions)

The redundant post information will be removed from the WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Revisions cleared)

After a period of time, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to save your revisions again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off) …

(WordPress automatically begins storing your revisions again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize the site’s database …

(Keep your site’s database optimized – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The plugin checks to see if your WP database tables need optimization and performs a one-click WP database optimization routine that does not require you to log into your server control panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your database needs optimization)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you prune unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if the database tables need optimization, it also lets you do the following:

• Delete trashed comments, posts, and pages
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude selected posts/pages and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule 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)

In addition to deleting redundant page and post revisions and checking if the database tables need optimization, this plugin also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Remove stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• View database table statistics
• Receive email notifications on automatic cleanups
• Highlights dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings Panel)

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

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned post meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP Sweep Plugin – Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep WordPress 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 search for 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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