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 save a page or post, WordPress begins to store revisions of the content in its database. These show up in a Revisions section at the bottom of your post or page …

(Post Editor screen – View the revisions box)

For most WordPress users, having access to effective workflow features like autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt something that can help make work more productive. If you write or edit extensively, however, over time the revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

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

For example, if there are 10 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 5 revisions your WordPress database could be storing up to 500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 500 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 50MB.

The good news is that there are several free plugins available that can help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your database and other database content belonging to each revision like tags, relationships, meta data, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, the plugin can optimize your database.

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

(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings Menu)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Posts revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ below the list to clear all items from the WP database, or select the ‘No, …’ button to exit the plugin with all post revisions undeleted …

(Better Delete Revision – Delete list of revisions)

The unnecessary revisions will be cleared from your database …

(List of revisions removed)

As WordPress automatically stores post revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you have turned the feature off). After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible …

(WordPress will automatically begin saving your post revisions again!)

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

(Optimize your database)

The plugin checks to see if the WordPress database tables need to be optimized and provides a one-click optimization routine without the need to log into your hosting panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the database tables need optimization)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only lets you prune unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (with the option of keeping a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if your WordPress database needs cleaning and optimization, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude specific pages/posts and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin Settings Panel)

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 removing redundant page and post revisions and checking if the database needs cleaning and optimization, this plugin also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all transient options
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• Display database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after automatic database cleanup
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize WP Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep WP Plugin)

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

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

(WP Sweep Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep

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 WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Plugins Menu – Add 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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