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 save a post/page, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions list at the bottom of your page editor …
(Viewing the WordPress revisions list)
Autosave and revisions are no doubt functions that help create a more productive workflow. If you write and edit often, however, the revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.
(Your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)
For example, if you have 200 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing around 3,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 3,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 300MB.
Fortunately, there are some great plugins for WordPress to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are some of these:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision WP Plugin)
This plugin removes redundant revisions of posts from your database as well as other database content related to each revision such as relationships, tags, meta data, and more.
After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use it to optimize your database.
Log into your WordPress dashboard, then go to your navigation menu and choose select Settings > Better Delete Revision …
(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)
This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be safely deleted from the WordPress database …
(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)
Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post, the plugin displays a list of post revisions stored in your database …
(List of revisions)
Click on the button below the list to remove all items from the database …
(Better Delete Revision – Delete list of post revisions)
The redundant items will be removed from your WordPress database …
(Revisions deleted – Better Delete Revision Manager)
As WordPress automatically saves your post revisions, the process will automatically begin again. After a period of time and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible …
(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)
You can also use this plugin to optimize the site’s database …
(Keep the site’s database optimized)
The plugin checks to see if your database needs optimization and provides a one-click database optimization maintenance routine that does not require you to log into your hosting panel or use technical database management applications …
(Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click table optimization maintenance routine)
For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)
OptimizeDatabase not only lets you delete unnecessary page and post revisions (with the option of keeping an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:
- Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
- Delete spammed comments
- Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
- Exclude selected tables or 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 Plugin For WordPress
WP Optimize
(WP-Optimize WP Plugin)
In addition to performing tasks such as deleting unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and performing WordPress database table optimization maintenance, this plugin also lets you do database maintenance tasks like:
- Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
- Removal of stale metadata from comments
- Mobile device friendly
- Removal of all transient options
- Clean up auto draft posts
- Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
- Add or remove link on WP admin bar
- Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
- Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
- Receive email notifications after scheduled database cleanups
- Displays potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
- And more!
(WP-Optimize Plugin – Settings Panel)
For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress
WP Sweep
(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress)
In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary post revisions, WP Sweep also cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Spammed comments
- Orphaned post meta
- Duplicated post meta
- Transient options
- And more!
(WP Sweep Plugin – Settings)
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 database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …
(Add Plugin – 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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