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 edit and update a post/page, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions list at the bottom of the post editor …

(Post Editor section – Viewing the revisions list)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help create a more productive workflow. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, the revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

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

For example, if there are 100 posts published on your site and each post has 15 revisions your database could be storing an extra 1,500 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,500 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 150MB.

Fortunately, there are several plugins available to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WordPress Plugin)

This plugin removes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database as well as other revision-related content like meta information, relationships, tags, and more.

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

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

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate how many redundant post revisions can be removed from the 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 display a table of revisions stored in the database …

(List of revisions)

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

(Remove list of post revisions)

The unnecessary post information will be cleared from the database …

(List of revisions deleted – Better Delete Revision Manager)

After a period of time, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins storing all post revisions again (unless you specifically turn the feature off) …

(Post revisions automatically start being stored again!)

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

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

The plugin checks to see if the database tables need to be optimized and provides a one-click optimization feature without requiring you to log into your hosting control panel or use technical tools …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you delete unnecessary page and post revisions (with the added option to keep an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click table cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following optional tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• 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 Plugin – Settings Page)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize WP Plugin)

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

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove transient options
• Clear out the 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 on automatic cleanup
• Displays dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphan comment meta
• Duplicated post meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP Sweep 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

For more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Add New Plugin – WordPress Plugins Menu)

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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