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.

Revision Management Plugins

As soon as you save pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions list at the bottom of your page or post …

(Post Editor screen – The Post revisions list)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt features that help create a more productive workflow. If you write a lot of content, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able 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 20 revisions your WordPress database could be storing an extra 6,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 6,000 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 600MB.

The good news is that there are some really great free WordPress plugins available to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database as well as other revision-related content like meta data, tags, relationships, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can use it to perform optimizations on your database.

In your admin menu area, 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 your WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of revisions)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Clear list of revisions)

The unnecessary data will be deleted from the database …

(List of revisions cleared – Better Delete Revision Manager)

After a period of time, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins saving all new post revisions again …

(WordPress will automatically begin saving all revisions again!)

You can also use the plugin to optimize the database …

(Better Delete Revision – Keep the WP database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if the database tables need to be optimized and runs a one-click table optimization routine without the need to log into your hosting panel or mess with complicated software …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you delete unnecessary page and post revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if your database tables need optimization, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• 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 – WordPress Plugin

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize WordPress Plugin)

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

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• Receive email notifications after automatic database cleanup
• Displays dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin)

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

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

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

(WordPress 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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