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 save your pages/posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions section below your post or page …

(WordPress post revisions list)

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

(Your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 50 posts published on your site and each post has 20 revisions your WordPress database could be storing an extra 1,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,000 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 100MB.

Fortunately, there are a few great plugins for WordPress available that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WP Plugin)

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

After the plugin has been installed and activated, Better Delete Revision can optimize your WP database without having to log into your server.

Go to your 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 the number of redundant post revisions can be deleted from your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions related to each post entry, the plugin return a table of revisions stored in the WP database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Posts revisions)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Remove posts revisions)

The redundant data will be deleted from the database …

(Revisions cleared – Better Delete Revision)

After a while, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WordPress database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins to store all new post revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …

(Revisions automatically start being saved again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the database optimized …

(Optimize the database)

The plugin checks to see if your database tables need optimization and provides an easy one-click table optimization function that does not require you to log into your hosting control panel or use complicated applications …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the database needs optimization)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress)

OptimizeDatabase not only lets you remove redundant post and page revisions (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if your database needs to be cleaned and optimized, it also lets you do the following:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to performing tasks such as removing redundant revisions of pages and posts and performing cleaning and optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Removal of trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Remove all transient options
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• Receive email notifications after automatic cleanup
• Highlights dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep)

In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary revisions, WP-Sweep also cleans up:

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphaned term relationships
• Duplicated post meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WPSweep – WordPress Plugin Settings)

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 type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add 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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