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 create, edit, and update a post or page, WordPress begins to store revisions for your content in its database. These appear in a Revisions box at the bottom of the post editor …

(Viewing the WordPress post revisions list – Post Editor screen)

For most WordPress users, having features like autosave and revisions is undoubtedly a great thing. If you write a lot of content, however, over time the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

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

The good news is that there are a few great plugins for WordPress available to 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 removes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database as well as database content related to each revision such as relationships, tags, meta information, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can perform optimizations on your database without having to log into your server.

Log into your WordPress site, then go to your navigation menu and choose click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

A table of post revisions stored in your database will be returned on the screen …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – List of revisions)

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

(Remove posts revisions)

The unnecessary data will be deleted from your WP database …

(Revisions deleted)

After a period of time, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin saving your new revisions again …

(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use the plugin to optimize the site’s database …

(Optimize your database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database needs optimization and lets you perform a one-click table optimization routine that does not require you to log into your hosting control panel or use complicated database management tools …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click optimization routine)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to prune redundant revisions of pages and posts (with the option to keep an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the WordPress database tables need cleaning and optimization, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• 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 Panel)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize)

In addition to cleaning unnecessary post and page revisions and checking if the WP database tables need cleaning and optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Removal of 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 schedules of optimization
• Display database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after automatic cleanups
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphaned comment meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP-Sweep – Settings Screen)

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 “Manage Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, 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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