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.

Managing Post Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you edit and update pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions section at the bottom of the page or post …

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

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more efficient. 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 manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 200 posts on your site and each post has 15 revisions your database could be storing around 3,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 3,000 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 300MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your database as well as other database content related to each revision like tags, meta data, relationships, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, the plugin can perform optimizations on your database without having to log into your server.

In your WordPress Dashboard, choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WP Settings – Better Delete Revision)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate how many redundant post revisions can be removed from your database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Posts revisions)

Click on the button below the list to clear all items from your database …

(Remove list of post revisions – Better Delete Revision)

The redundant data will be cleared from your WordPress database …

(Revisions cleared – Better Delete Revision)

As WordPress automatically saves your new revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you specifically turn the feature off). After a while and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website and their related post revisions, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible …

(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)

You can also use the plugin to optimize the database …

(Optimize the database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WordPress database needs to be optimized and lets you perform an easy one-click optimization maintenance routine that does not require you to log into your hosting control panel …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you prune unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if your database tables need optimization, it also lets you do the following optional maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude certain pages/posts and tables from optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

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

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and checking if the WordPress database tables need optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Removal of all transient options
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• View database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after scheduled database cleanups
• Highlights potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize WordPress Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize WordPress Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WPSweep Plugin – Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep WP 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 “Post Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Add Plugins – 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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