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.

Post & Page Revision Management Using Plugins

As soon as you save a page or post, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions list below your content editor …

(Post Editor screen – View the WordPress post revisions list)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help create a more effective workflow. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, the revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow 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 you have 200 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each you could be storing around 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 200MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant post revisions from your database and database content associated with each revision such as tags, relationships, meta data, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can use the Better Delete Revision Manager to perform optimizations on your database.

Log into your WordPress site, then go to the main navigation menu and select select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings Menu – 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 the database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Posts revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button to clear all list items from your WordPress database, or choose ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to abandon the process and exit the Better Delete Revision settings screen with all post revisions undeleted …

(Delete posts revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The redundant post revisions will be removed from your database …

(Revisions list cleared – Better Delete Revision)

After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin saving all new revisions again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off) …

(WordPress automatically begins saving your post revisions again!)

Like the other plugins described in this section, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the WordPress database optimized …

(Better Delete Revision – Optimize the WP database)

The plugin checks to see if your database needs optimization and runs a one-click optimization maintenance routine that does not require you to log into your hosting panel or mess with technical database management tools …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you remove unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (with the option to keep an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the WordPress database needs optimization, it also lets you do the following:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to removing unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and performing table optimization maintenance routines, WP Optimize also lets you perform database maintenance tasks such as:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Remove trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data 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
• Receive email notifications on automatic cleanup
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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

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

(WP-Sweep Plugin – Settings Page)

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 type in keywords like “Manage Post Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Add 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.

***

***