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 your pages/posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions box below your post or page …

(Post Editor screen – Viewing the WordPress post revisions list)

Having autosave and revisions is something that helps make work more efficient. If you write or edit extensively, however, after a while the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if you have 100 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 15 revisions your database could be storing an extra 1,500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,500 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 150MB.

Fortunately, there are some great WordPress plugins to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

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

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use the plugin to perform optimizations on your WP database.

In your main menu of your WordPress Dashboard, choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings – Better Delete Revision)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate how many redundant post revisions can be safely removed from the database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions associated with each post entry, the plugin display a list of post revisions stored in your WordPress database …

(Posts revisions)

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

(Remove list of post revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The unnecessary post revisions will be cleared from the database …

(Post revisions deleted)

After a period of time, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to save all revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …

(WordPress will automatically begin to save your new post revisions again!)

Like the other plugins described in this section, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep your WordPress database optimized …

(Optimize your database)

The plugin checks to see if your WordPress database tables need to be optimized and lets you run an easy one-click table optimization routine without the need to log into your hosting control panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your database needs to be optimized)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you prune redundant revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude selected posts/pages and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

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

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to cleaning redundant revisions of pages and posts and checking if the WordPress database needs optimization, this plugin also lets you perform database maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• 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
• View database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after automatic cleanups
• Highlights dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin)

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

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

(WP Sweep – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep

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 WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New 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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