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 WordPress Plugins

As soon as you update your pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions section below the post or page …

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

For most users, having access to content workflow functions like autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt a great thing. If you write and edit often, however, the 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.

(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 an average of 20 revisions your WordPress database could be storing an extra 2,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 200MB.

Fortunately, there are a number of free WordPress plugins 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 deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and other revision-related content like meta data, relationships, tags, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, the plugin can perform optimizations on your database.

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

(WordPress Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Posts revisions list)

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

(Delete list of post revisions – Better Delete Revision)

The redundant post revisions will be removed from the database …

(Post revisions cleared)

After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WordPress database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin saving your new post revisions again …

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

Like the other plugins listed in this section, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your WP database …

(Better Delete Revision – Optimize the WP database)

The plugin checks to see if the database tables need to be optimized and performs a one-click database optimization routine without the need to log into your hosting panel or use technical database management software …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision WP 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 prune unnecessary page and post revisions (with the added option of keeping an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the WP database tables need optimization, it also lets you perform the following optional tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• Exclude certain posts/pages and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize WordPress Plugin)

In addition to cleaning unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and checking if the WordPress database tables need to be optimized, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• Receive email notifications on automatic cleanups
• Marks dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize WP Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep)

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

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

(WPSweep Plugin For WordPress – 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 WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(Add Plugin – 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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