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 WordPress Plugins

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

(Post Editor screen – The revisions box)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more productive. If you write often, however, the 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.

(Your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 300 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each you could be storing up to 6,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 6,000 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 600MB.

The good news is that there are various WordPress plugins available to help you 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)

This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and other revision-related content such as relationships, tags, meta data, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, the plugin can perform optimizations on your database without having to log into your server.

Log into the Dashboard and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WP Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

A table of post revisions stored in the database will display on the screen …

(Better Delete Revision – List of post revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to delete all list items from the database …

(Delete list of revisions)

The unnecessary post information will be cleared from your WP database …

(Post revisions list removed)

After a while, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to save your post revisions again …

(Revisions automatically start being saved again!)

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

(Optimize the database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database needs optimization and provides a one-click optimization feature that does not require you to log into your hosting control panel or mess with technical database management software …

(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 Plugin For WordPress)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you delete redundant page and post revisions (with the option of keeping an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if your database needs cleaning and optimization, it also lets you do maintenance tasks like:

• Delete trashed comments, posts, and pages
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude selected posts/pages and tables from optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

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

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Removal of akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out the post trash
• 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 scheduling
• Display database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after scheduled database cleanup
• Displays dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep)

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

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

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress – 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

In addition to the above plugins, you can view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your 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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