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 Revisions Using Plugins

As soon as you edit and save a post or page, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions list below your post or page …

(View the WordPress post revisions box – Post Editor screen)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt features that help create a more effective workflow. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(Your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if there are 250 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing an extra 2,500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,500 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 250MB.

The good news is that there are a number of plugins for WordPress to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

This plugin removes redundant post revisions from your database and other database content belonging to each revision such as relationships, tags, meta data, and more.

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

Log into your WordPress dashboard, then go to your navigation menu and click on choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WordPress Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button 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 calculates and displays a table of revisions stored in your WordPress database …

(List of revisions)

Click on the button below the list to delete the items from the WordPress database …

(Remove list of revisions)

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

(Revisions cleared)

As WordPress automatically saves your new revisions, the process will automatically start again. After some time has passed and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible …

(Revisions automatically start being saved again!)

You can also use the plugin to keep the database optimized …

(Optimize your site’s database – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database tables need to be optimized and runs an easy one-click optimization routine without the need to log into your hosting control panel or use complicated database management applications …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

OptimizeDatabase not only lets you delete unnecessary post and page revisions (with the option of keeping an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if the database needs cleaning and optimization, it also lets you perform the following optional tasks:

• Delete trashed comments, pages, and posts
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude certain tables or even specific pages/posts from optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin)

In addition to removing redundant page and post revisions and checking if the WordPress database needs optimization, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• 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
• Display database table statistics
• Receive email notifications after scheduled database cleanups
• Highlights dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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

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

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress – 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 database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Plugins Menu – Add New 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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