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 Content Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and update your pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions list below your page editor …

(Post revisions list)

For most users, having access to workflow features like autosave and automatic revisions is undoubtedly a timesaver. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, after a while the 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.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if you have 10 posts published on your site with an average of 5 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing around 500 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 500 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 50MB.

The good news is that there are some really great free WordPress plugins available to help you control and 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 revisions of posts from your database and other database content belonging to each revision like tags, meta information, relationships, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, Better Delete Revision can perform optimizations on your WordPress database.

Log into your WordPress site, then go to the admin navigation menu and choose select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WP Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(Posts revisions)

Click on the button below the list to delete all items from the WP database, or choose the ‘No, …’ button to exit the plugin settings screen …

(Remove posts revisions list)

The redundant post revisions will be deleted from the WP database …

(Revisions deleted)

After a while and depending on the amount of content you have published on your site, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins to save your post revisions again …

(Post revisions automatically start again!)

Like the other plugins described in this section, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep your database optimized …

(Optimize your WordPress database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database needs to be optimized and provides an easy one-click WordPress database table optimization feature without the need to log into your hosting control panel or use technical database management tools …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the database needs to be optimized)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you remove redundant page and post revisions (with the added option of keeping an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click table optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you do the following:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning redundant post and page revisions and performing WP database table cleaning and optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out 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
• Display database table statistics
• Receive email notifications after automatic cleanup
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphan comment meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP Sweep 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

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 Post Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(Add Plugins – 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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