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 create, edit, and save pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions list at the bottom of the post editor …

(View the revisions list)

For most users, having autosave and revisions is undoubtedly very useful. If you write or edit extensively, however, over time the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if you have 50 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing up to 1,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 100MB.

The good news is that there are various free WordPress plugins available to help you 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 Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin removes redundant revisions of posts from your database as well as database content associated with each revision such as meta information, tags, relationships, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, the plugin can perform optimizations on your database without having to log into your server.

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

(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings)

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 safely remove from the database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

A list of revisions stored in your WordPress database will be returned on the screen …

(List of post revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to clear all list items from your WP database, or select the ‘No, …’ button to exit the tool …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Remove list of post revisions)

The redundant items will be cleared from your database …

(Revisions removed – Better Delete Revision)

As WordPress automatically saves your post revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you have turned the feature off). After a while, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible …

(WordPress will automatically begin to save your new post revisions again!)

Like the other plugins listed in this section, you can also use this plugin to keep your site’s database optimized …

(Better Delete Revision – Optimize the WP database)

The plugin checks to see if the database tables need optimization and provides a one-click optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your server panel or mess with technical database management applications …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the WordPress database needs to be optimized)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

The Optimize Database plugin not only can be used to delete unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (with the option of keeping a specific number of the 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 posts, comments, and pages
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• Exclude certain posts/pages and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

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

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning redundant revisions of pages and posts and checking if your WordPress database tables need optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• 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
• See database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after automatic cleanup
• Displays dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings Page)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned comment meta
• Duplicated post meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep – WordPress 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 type in keywords like “Post Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(Plugins Menu – Add New 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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