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 Using Plugins
As soon as you edit and update a page/post, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions section at the bottom of the page editor …
(Post Editor section – The WordPress revisions list)
Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help create a more effective workflow. If you write or edit a lot of content, however, 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.
(Post revisions can really add up after a while)
For example, if there are 100 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing around 1,500 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,500 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 150MB.
The good news is that there are various free plugins that can help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision Plugin)
Better Delete Revision deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database as well as database content related to each revision such as tags, meta information, relationships, and more.
After the plugin has been installed and activated, Better Delete Revision can optimize your WordPress database.
In the Dashboard, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …
(Better Delete Revision – Settings)
This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate how many redundant post revisions can be safely removed from the WP database …
(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)
Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post, the plugin calculates and displays a table of post revisions stored in the database …
(Better Delete Revision – List of revisions)
Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to clear all items from your WP database, or select the ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ button to exit the plugin with all post revisions undeleted …
(Delete list of revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)
The unnecessary post information will be cleared from the database …
(Better Delete Revision Manager – Post revisions removed)
As WordPress automatically saves your post revisions, the process will automatically begin again. After some time has passed and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website and their associated post revisions, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible …
(Revisions automatically start being saved again!)
Like the other plugins described in this section, you can also use this plugin to keep the database optimized …
(Optimize your site’s database – Better Delete Revision Manager)
The plugin checks to see if your WordPress database tables need to be optimized and runs an easy one-click WP database optimization routine without requiring you to log into your hosting control panel or mess with technical database management software …
(Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click table optimization routine)
For more details, go here}:
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)
OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to prune unnecessary page and post revisions (with the added option to keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click database cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:
- Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
- Delete spammed comments
- Delete ‘expired transients’
- Exclude certain pages/posts and tables from cleaning and optimization
- Automatically schedule optimizations
- And more!
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin Settings Panel)
For more details, go here}:
WP-Optimize
(WP-Optimize WP Plugin)
In addition to cleaning unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and checking if the WordPress database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, WP Optimize also lets you perform maintenance tasks like:
- Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
- Removal of akismet metadata from comments
- Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
- Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
- Clear out the post trash
- Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
- Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
- Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
- See database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
- Receive email notifications after scheduled cleanups
- Marks dangerous cleanup operations in red
- And more!
(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings Panel)
For more details, go here}:
WP Sweep
(WP Sweep Plugin)
In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary revisions, this plugin also cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Spammed comments
- Orphan term relationships
- Duplicated post meta
- Transient options
- And more!
(WPSweep – Settings Screen)
For more details, go here}:
In addition to the above plugins, you can view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Manage Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …
(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New)
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 an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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