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 create, edit, and save pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions box below your content editor …

(Post Editor screen – The WordPress post revisions list)

For most WordPress users, having autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt a great thing. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, the number of revisions can start building 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 there are 300 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions your database could be storing around 6,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 6,000 revisions, the total space wasted is about 600MB.

The good news is that there are various free WordPress plugins available to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WP Plugin)

This plugin removes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and database content related to each revision like relationships, meta information, tags, and more.

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

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

(WP Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(Delete list of revisions)

The unnecessary data will be cleared from the database …

(Revisions list deleted)

After some time has passed and depending on the amount of content you have published on your site, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins saving your new post revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …

(Revisions automatically start again!)

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

(Keep your database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if your database tables need to be optimized and provides an easy one-click table optimization routine that does not require you to log into your hosting control panel or use technical database management tools …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to delete unnecessary post and page revisions (with the added option of keeping an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click table optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

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

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

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize)

In addition to deleting unnecessary page and post revisions and checking if the database needs cleaning and optimization, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Removal of stale 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
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• See database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after scheduled cleanup
• Highlights dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphan comment meta
• Duplicated user meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WPSweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep 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 “Revisions“, “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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