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.

Content Revision Management Using Plugins

As soon as you update your posts/pages, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions box at the bottom of the post editor …

(Post revisions list – Post Editor screen)

For most users, having access to content workflow features like autosave and revisions is undoubtedly a good thing. If you write 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 manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 200 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each you could be storing up to 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 200MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your database as well as other database content belonging to each revision such as tags, meta information, relationships, and more.

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

Log into the Dashboard and choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WP Settings – Better Delete Revision)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager screen. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be removed from your WP database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post, the plugin will then calculate and return a table of revisions stored in the database …

(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ below the list to clear all items from the database, or select the ‘No, …’ button to cancel the process and exit the plugin …

(Clear list of post revisions)

The redundant post information will be cleared from the database …

(List of post revisions cleared – Better Delete Revision)

After some time has passed and depending on the amount of content you have published on your site, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin storing your new revisions again (unless you specifically turn the feature off) …

(WordPress automatically begins to save all revisions again!)

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

(Keep your WP database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if the WP database tables need optimization and lets you run an easy one-click table optimization routine that does not require you to log into your server panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the database tables need optimization)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

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 the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click table optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude certain tables or even specific posts/pages from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning redundant revisions of pages and posts and checking if the WP database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all transient options
• 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 optimization scheduling
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• Receive email notifications on automatic cleanups
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize WordPress Plugin – Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphaned user meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WPSweep Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

For 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 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.

***

***