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 WordPress Plugins

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

(Post Editor section – Viewing the WordPress post revisions box)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help create a more productive workflow. If you write or edit extensively, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow 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 50 posts published on your site and each post has 20 revisions you could be storing an extra 1,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,000 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 100MB.

Fortunately, there are several free plugins for WordPress that can help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your database and other database content belonging to each revision such as meta data, tags, relationships, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, the plugin can optimize your WP database without having to log into your server.

Go to the WordPress Dashboard and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(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 can be deleted from the database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of post revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Delete list of revisions)

The redundant data will be cleared from the database …

(Post revisions removed – Better Delete Revision Manager)

As WordPress automatically stores your revisions, the process will automatically begin again. After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WordPress database as light as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start again!)

Like the other plugins listed in this section, you can also use the plugin to optimize your WP database …

(Keep your database optimized – Better Delete Revision)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WordPress database needs to be optimized and provides a one-click table optimization feature that does not require you to log into your server control panel or use technical database management applications …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you remove unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click table cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you do database maintenance tasks such as:

• Delete trashed comments, pages, and posts
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude selected posts/pages and tables from cleaning and 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 Plugin

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize WordPress Plugin)

In addition to removing unnecessary page and post revisions and performing table cleaning and optimization routines, WP Optimize also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove stale spam comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• Display database table statistics
• Receive email notifications after automatic database cleanups
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin)

WP-Sweep allows you to clean up unused, duplicated, and orphaned data in the WP database, including revisions. This plugin cleans up:

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

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings Page)

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

In addition to the above plugins, you can view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Manage Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, 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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