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 save posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions section at the bottom of your page or post …

(Post Editor section – Viewing the Revisions box)

Having workflow features like autosave and automatic revisions is undoubtedly a great thing. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, after a while the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

(As post revisions accumulate, your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 100 posts published on your site and each post has 20 revisions you could be storing up to 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 200MB.

Fortunately, there are various free plugins available that can help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin removes redundant revisions of posts from your database and other revision-related content such as relationships, meta information, tags, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can optimize your WordPress database.

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

(Settings – Better Delete Revision)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate how many redundant post revisions can be deleted from the database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post entry, the plugin will then calculate and display a table of revisions stored in your database …

(Posts revisions list)

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

(Delete posts revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The unnecessary post revisions will be cleared from your WP database …

(Revisions cleared – Better Delete Revision)

After a while, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins saving all revisions again (unless you specifically turn the feature off) …

(WordPress will automatically begin saving post revisions again!)

You can also use this plugin to keep your database optimized …

(Keep the database optimized – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only can be used to remove redundant revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if the database tables need cleaning and optimization, it also lets you do the following optional maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude certain tables or even specific pages/posts from 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 Plugin For WordPress

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting unnecessary post and page revisions and checking if the WordPress database tables need cleaning and optimization, this plugin also lets you do database maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Removal of stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all transient options
• 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.g. how much space has been cleared
• Receive email notifications after automatic cleanups
• Highlights dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphan post meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP Sweep WP Plugin – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep 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 WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New Plugin)

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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