WordPress Plugins For Managing WordPress Post Revisions

In this tutorial, we look at a number of WordPress plugins that will help you manage your post revisions.

WordPress Plugins For Managing WordPress Post Revisions

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.

Revision Management Using Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and save a post/page, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions section below the post editor …

Post Editor section - Viewing the Revisions list

(View the WordPress post revisions list)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help create a more productive workflow. If you write or edit often, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

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

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

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

Fortunately, there are various free plugins that can help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are some of these:

Better Delete Revision

Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database as well as database content associated with each revision such as meta data, relationships, tags, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can use it to perform optimizations on your database.

Go to the Dashboard and select Settings > Better Delete Revision

Settings - Better Delete Revision

(Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate the number of redundant post revisions you can delete from your WordPress database …

Better Delete Revision Manager - Check Revision Posts

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

List of revisions - Better Delete Revision Manager

(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision)

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

Remove posts revisions list - Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Clear posts revisions)

The redundant items will be cleared from the WP database …

Post revisions list deleted - Better Delete Revision Manager

(Revisions list removed – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Useful Tip

After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins to store post revisions again …

WordPress will automatically begin to store post revisions again!

(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)

Like the other plugins described in this section, you can also use the plugin to keep the site’s database optimized …

Optimize your database

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

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your WP database tables need to be optimized and provides a one-click table optimization maintenance routine that does not require you to log into your server control panel …

Better Delete Revision checks if the database needs optimization

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click optimization maintenance routine)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you delete unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click cleaning and optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you perform optional maintenance tasks like:

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions - Settings

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

WP-Optimize - WordPress Plugin

(WP Optimize)

In addition to performing tasks such as removing unnecessary post and page revisions and performing table optimization maintenance routines, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

  • Enable/Disable comments for published posts
  • Remove stale metadata from comments
  • Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
  • Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
  • 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
  • Receive email notifications after automatic cleanups
  • Displays potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
  • And more!

WP Optimize WP Plugin - Settings

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

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

WP-Sweep

WP Sweep Plugin

(WP-Sweep Plugin)

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

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

WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress - Settings Panel

(WP-Sweep – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep Plugin

Simple Revisions Delete

Simple Revisions Delete
Simple Revisions Delete – WordPress plugin

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.

Publish box - Revisions: Purge link.
Click the Purge link to delete post revisions from your WordPress database.

For more details, go here: Simple Revisions Delete

WP REVISIONS CONTROL

WP Revisions Control
WP Revisions Control

This plugin lets you specify the number of revisions retained for each post type in the Settings > Writing screen.

WP Revisions Control Settings
WP Revisions Control Settings.

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 search for keywords like “Post Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

Plugins Menu - Add Plugin

(Add Plugins – Plugins Menu)

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

WordPress Plugins For Managing WordPress Post Revisions

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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now

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