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 save your pages/posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions box at the bottom of your content editor …

(WordPress revisions box)

Having workflow functions like autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt very useful. If you write or edit extensively, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase 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 on your site and each post has an average of 10 revisions you could be storing around 1,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 100MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WP Plugin)

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

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use it to optimize your database without having to log into your server.

In your WordPress administration area, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WP Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions belonging to each post entry, the plugin display a list of revisions stored in your WP database …

(Posts revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to delete the items from your WordPress database, or abandon the process and exit the Better Delete Revision Manager settings page with your post revisions undeleted …

(Delete list of post revisions)

The redundant post revisions will be removed from your WP database …

(Post revisions deleted)

After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website and their related post revisions, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to save your new post revisions again (unless you specifically turn the feature off) …

(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)

You can also use the plugin to optimize your site’s database …

(Optimize your database – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database tables need optimization and provides a one-click table optimization feature without requiring you to log into your hosting control panel or use complicated database management tools …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you prune redundant revisions of pages and posts (with the added option of keeping an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the WP database tables need cleaning and optimization, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude selected pages/posts and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Screen)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin)

In addition to deleting redundant revisions of pages and posts and checking if your WP database needs to be cleaned and optimized, this plugin also lets you do database maintenance tasks such as:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all transient options
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data 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 on automatic cleanup
• Highlights potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings)

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

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WPSweep – Settings Panel)

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

For more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Manage Post Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(Add Plugins – 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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