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 edit and save a page/post, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions box at the bottom of your page or post …

(Post Editor screen – The post revisions list)

For most users, having features like autosave and revisions is a good thing. If you write and edit often, however, the revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

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

For example, if there are 10 posts on your site and each post has an average of 5 revisions your database could be storing around 500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 500 revisions, the total space wasted is about 50MB.

The good news is that there are a few great plugins for WordPress available that can help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

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

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

Log into your WP admin section and select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WP Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions related to each post, the plugin returns a list of revisions stored in your database …

(Posts revisions)

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

(Remove list of post revisions)

The redundant post revisions will be cleared from the WordPress database …

(Post revisions list removed – Better Delete Revision)

As WordPress automatically stores all new revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off). After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site and their related post revisions, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible …

(Revisions automatically start again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the database optimized …

(Optimize the WordPress database – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WordPress database needs optimization and provides a one-click optimization function that does not require you to log into your hosting control panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only can be used to prune redundant revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the database tables need to be optimized, it also lets you perform the following optional tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress – Settings Page)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting redundant page and post revisions and performing table cleaning and optimization routines, WP Optimize also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of stale spam comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• See database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after automatic database cleanup
• Displays dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin)

WP Sweep lets you clean up orphaned, duplicated, and unused data in your database, including post revisions. This plugin cleans up:

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphan term relationships
• Duplicated user meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WPSweep – Settings Page)

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

(Add New Plugin – Plugins Menu)

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

***

***