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 Revisions Using Plugins
As soon as you create, edit, and save pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions section below the content editor …
(Post Editor section – Viewing the Revisions list)
Autosave and revisions are no doubt functions that help create a more productive workflow. If you write or edit a lot of content, however, after a while the number of 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.
(Post revisions can really add up after a while)
For example, if there are 100 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 15 revisions you could be storing an extra 1,500 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,500 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 150MB.
The good news is that there are a number of plugins to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Let’s take a look at some of these:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision Plugin)
Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your database and other revision-related content such as meta data, relationships, tags, and more.
After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can optimize your WordPress database without having to log into your server.
Log into your WordPress dashboard, then go to the admin navigation menu and click on choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …
(WordPress Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)
This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be removed from the WP database …
(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)
Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post entry, the plugin calculates and returns a list of revisions stored in the database …
(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision)
Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to delete all list items from the database …
(Better Delete Revision – Remove posts revisions)
The unnecessary data will be cleared from the WP database …
(Better Delete Revision Manager – List of post revisions cleared)
As WordPress automatically saves your post revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you specifically turn the feature off). After a while, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as light as possible …
(Post revisions automatically start again!)
Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your database …
(Keep the site’s database optimized – Better Delete Revision Manager)
Better Delete Revision checks to see if your WordPress database tables need optimization and provides a one-click database optimization routine without requiring you to log into your server control panel or use technical database management applications …
(Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click table optimization maintenance routine)
For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress
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 delete unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (with the added option of keeping a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if the database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, it also lets you do the following:
- Delete trashed comments, pages, and posts
- Delete spammed comments
- Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
- Exclude certain pages/posts and tables from cleaning and optimization
- Automatically schedule optimizations
- And more!
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin – Settings)
For more details, go here: Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress
WP-Optimize
(WP-Optimize WordPress Plugin)
In addition to deleting unnecessary page and post revisions and performing cleaning and optimization maintenance routines, this plugin also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:
- Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
- Removal of unapproved comments
- Mobile device friendly
- Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
- Clean up auto draft posts
- Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
- Add or remove link on WP admin bar
- Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
- View database table statistics
- E-mail notifications on scheduled cleanup
- Marks potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
- And more!
(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings Panel)
For more details, go here: WP Optimize WP Plugin
WP Sweep
(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)
WP Sweep lets you clean up unused, duplicated, and orphaned data in the database, including revisions. This plugin cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Unapproved comments
- Orphaned term meta
- Duplicated user meta
- Unused terms
- And more!
(WP Sweep Plugin – Settings Page)
For more details, go here: WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress
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
To view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …
(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add Plugin)
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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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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