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 Content Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and save posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions box at the bottom of your page editor …

(WordPress revisions list)

Having access to workflow features like autosave and revisions is no doubt a timesaver. If you write and edit often, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase 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 there are 200 posts on your site and each post has an average of 10 revisions you could be storing up to 2,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 200MB.

Fortunately, there are several free WordPress plugins available that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

This plugin removes redundant post revisions from your database as well as other database content associated with each revision such as meta information, relationships, tags, and more.

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

Log into your WordPress site, then go to the navigation menu and select select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

A list of revisions stored in the database will be returned on the screen …

(Better Delete Revision – Posts revisions)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Clear list of revisions)

The unnecessary post revisions will be cleared from your database …

(Revisions list deleted – Better Delete Revision Manager)

As WordPress automatically stores your new post revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you have turned the feature off). After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site and their related post revisions, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible …

(Revisions automatically start being saved again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use the plugin to optimize your WP database …

(Keep the site’s database optimized – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The plugin checks to see if the database needs to be optimized and lets you run an easy one-click optimization maintenance routine without the need to log into your hosting panel or use technical 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 Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to prune redundant post and page revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click database cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning redundant page and post revisions and performing WP database cleaning and optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove stale spam comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all transient options
• 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 optimization scheduling
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications after automatic cleanup
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep WordPress Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned comment meta
• Duplicated post meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP-Sweep Plugin – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress

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 database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Revisions“, “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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