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.

Page/Post Revision Management Using Plugins

As soon as you edit and update a post/page, WordPress begins to store revisions for your content in its database. These appear in a Revisions list at the bottom of your page editor …

(View the WordPress revisions box – Post Editor section)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt functions that help create a more effective workflow. If you write or edit extensively, however, over time the 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 on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions you could be storing around 6,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 6,000 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 600MB.

Fortunately, there are some great free plugins for WordPress that can 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 Plugin For WordPress)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and database content related to each revision like tags, relationships, meta data, and more.

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

Log into the Dashboard and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WordPress Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions you can safely remove from your WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(Posts revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to clear all items from the database, or exit the page with your post revisions undeleted …

(Remove posts revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The unnecessary data will be removed from the WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Revisions list deleted)

As WordPress automatically stores all post revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you specifically turn the feature off). After a while, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as lean as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start again!)

Like the other plugins described further below, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the WP database optimized …

(Optimize the database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WordPress database needs optimization and provides a one-click optimization feature without the need to log into your server panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only lets you remove redundant page and post revisions (with the added option of keeping a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if your WordPress database tables need cleaning and optimization, it also lets you perform maintenance tasks such as:

• Delete trashed comments, pages, and posts
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• Exclude certain tables and specific posts/pages from optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize WordPress Plugin)

In addition to cleaning redundant revisions of pages and posts and performing database optimization maintenance, this plugin also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• Receive email notifications on automatic cleanups
• Displays dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize WP Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphaned term relationships
• Duplicated comment meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP Sweep – 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

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

(Plugins Menu – Add Plugin)

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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