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 Using Plugins

As soon as you update your pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions box at the bottom of the post or page …

(The post revisions list – Post Editor section)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more efficient. If you write and edit extensively, however, after a while the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 100 posts on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions you could be storing up to 2,000 copies of unnecessary 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 some great plugins to help you 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 revision-related content such as relationships, meta data, tags, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can optimize your WordPress database without having to log into your server.

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

(Settings – Better Delete Revision)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions you can safely remove from your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(Posts revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(Delete posts revisions list)

The unnecessary items will be cleared from your database …

(Revisions list removed)

After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins saving all revisions again (unless you specifically turn the feature off) …

(Post revisions automatically start being stored again!)

You can also use this plugin to optimize your WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Optimize the database)

The plugin checks to see if your database tables need optimization and lets you perform an easy one-click table optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your server panel or use technical database management applications …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click WordPress database table optimization routine)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you delete unnecessary post and page revisions (with the option of keeping a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following optional tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Page)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize)

In addition to deleting unnecessary post and page revisions and performing optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Removal of akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove 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 optimization schedules
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications after scheduled cleanups
• Highlights potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned comment meta
• Duplicated post meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WPSweep – WordPress Plugin Settings)

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 WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Manage Post Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New)

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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