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 – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you edit and update pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions box below your post or page …

(Post Editor screen – The WordPress post revisions list)

For most users, having autosave and revisions is undoubtedly a timesaver. If you write or edit a lot of content, however, the revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(Your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if there are 100 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each you could be storing around 1,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions, the total space wasted is about 100MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

This plugin deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database as well as other revision-related content such as tags, meta data, relationships, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can use the plugin to optimize your database.

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

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Settings Menu)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post, the plugin returns a list of revisions stored in your WP database …

(Posts revisions list)

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

(Remove list of revisions)

The redundant revisions will be cleared from your database …

(Post revisions removed)

After some time has passed and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WordPress database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to save your new post revisions again (unless you specifically turn the feature off) …

(WordPress automatically begins storing your revisions again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the WordPress database optimized …

(Keep your database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if the database needs optimization and runs an easy one-click table optimization maintenance routine that does not require you to log into your server panel or use technical database management software …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your 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 Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you remove unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (with the added option of keeping an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if your WordPress database needs cleaning and optimization, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude specific pages/posts and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin)

In addition to deleting redundant page and post revisions and checking if your database tables need optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Remove stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications after automatic database cleanups
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WP Sweep WordPress Plugin – Settings Page)

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

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 “Post Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, 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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