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 Using Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and update pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions box at the bottom of your post editor …

(WordPress revisions box)

Having features like autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt a good thing. If you write or 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 be able to manage your revisions.

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

For example, if there are 100 posts published on your site and each post has 20 revisions you could be storing an extra 2,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 200MB.

Fortunately, there are several WordPress plugins to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant post revisions from your database as well as other revision-related content like relationships, meta data, tags, and more.

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

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

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager screen. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions you can safely remove from the database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Posts revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to remove all list items from your database, or exit the Better Delete Revision settings page with all post revisions undeleted …

(Delete posts revisions list)

The redundant revisions will be removed from your WP database …

(Revisions list deleted)

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

(Revisions automatically start again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the WP database optimized …

(Better Delete Revision – Keep the database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database tables need optimization and lets you run an easy one-click table optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your server control panel or use technical applications …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click table optimization routine)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you remove unnecessary page and post revisions (with the option of keeping an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click WordPress database optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude selected tables and specific pages/posts from optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting redundant revisions of pages and posts and checking if the database tables need optimization, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Removal of unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Remove all 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 scheduling
• See database table statistics
• E-mail notifications on scheduled cleanup
• Highlights dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings Page)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphaned comment meta
• Duplicated post meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP-Sweep 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 “Post Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Add 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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