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 edit and update pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions box at the bottom of the content editor …

(The post revisions box)

For most users, having access to effective workflow functions like autosave and revisions is no doubt a great thing. If you write and edit often, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

(As you write more posts, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if there are 200 posts on your site and each post has 20 revisions you could be storing an extra 4,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 4,000 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 400MB.

The good news is that there are a number of free plugins to help you control and manage 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)

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

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use the Better Delete Revision Manager to optimize your database without having to log into your server.

Log into your WordPress admin section, then go to your navigation menu and click on choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WP Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions related to each post, the plugin will then calculate and return a list of post revisions stored in your WP database …

(List of revisions – Better Delete Revision)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to delete all items from the database, or choose ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to exit the page …

(Better Delete Revision – Clear posts revisions)

The redundant items will be cleared from the WP database …

(Post revisions list deleted)

After a while and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins to save your new revisions again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off) …

(Revisions automatically start again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize the WordPress database …

(Optimize your WordPress database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WP database tables need optimization and performs a one-click table optimization routine that does not require you to log into your hosting control panel or mess with technical database management applications …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

OptimizeDatabase not only lets you remove unnecessary page and post revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click WordPress database table cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you do the following:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize)

In addition to cleaning redundant revisions of posts and pages and performing database cleaning and optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Remove all transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• Receive email notifications after scheduled database cleanup
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep WordPress Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphan user meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WPSweep WP Plugin – 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

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 “Manage Post Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Add New Plugins – WordPress Plugins Menu)

We hope that you have found the above information on plugins that will help you manage your WordPress post revisions useful.

***

***