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 Using Plugins

As soon as you update pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions box at the bottom of the page editor …

(Post Editor screen – View the revisions box)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt features that help make work more efficient. If you write and edit extensively, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

(As you write more posts on your site, your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 250 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 10 revisions you could be storing up to 2,500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,500 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 250MB.

Fortunately, there are some great free plugins available to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Let’s take a look at some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your database and other database content belonging to each revision such as relationships, meta information, tags, and more.

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

Go to your WP Dashboard and choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of post revisions)

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

(Delete posts revisions list)

The redundant data will be removed from your WordPress database …

(Post revisions deleted – Better Delete Revision Manager)

As WordPress automatically stores all post revisions, the process will automatically start again. After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as light as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins to store all revisions again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your database …

(Optimize the site’s database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database tables need to be optimized and provides a one-click database table optimization function that does not require you to log into your server control panel or mess with technical software …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to prune redundant revisions of pages and posts (with the option to keep an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click table cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude selected pages/posts and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Page)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

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

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• 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 optimization schedules
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• E-mail notifications on scheduled database cleanups
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin)

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

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

(WP Sweep – WordPress Plugin Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress

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 type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(Plugins Menu – Add Plugins)

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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