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.

Page & Post Revision Management 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 below your post editor …

(WordPress post revisions list)

Having workflow functions like autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt a timesaver. If you write and edit often, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(As post revisions accumulate, your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

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

The good news is that there are some great plugins available that can help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

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

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

In the Dashboard menu, select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions associated with each post, the plugin display a list of revisions stored in the database …

(Posts revisions list)

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

(Remove posts revisions)

The unnecessary post information will be deleted from your WordPress database …

(List of post revisions removed)

After some time has passed and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin saving all revisions again (unless you specifically turn the feature off) …

(Revisions automatically start being saved again!)

You can also use this plugin to keep your site’s database optimized …

(Keep the database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WordPress database tables need to be optimized and provides a one-click database optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your server panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your WP database tables need to be optimized)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only lets you delete redundant revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you do database maintenance tasks like:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

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

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of stale spam comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• Receive email notifications after scheduled cleanups
• Highlights dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep)

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

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphan term meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WPSweep – WordPress Plugin Settings Panel)

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“, 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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