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 a page or post, WordPress begins to store revisions of your content in its database. These appear in a Revisions section at the bottom of your post or page …
(View the post revisions list)
Autosave and post revisions are no doubt features that help create a more productive workflow. If you write or edit extensively, however, after a while the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.
(As post revisions accumulate, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)
For example, if there are 10 posts on your site and each post has 5 revisions your WordPress database could be storing up to 500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 500 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 50MB.
Fortunately, there are various plugins to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision WordPress Plugin)
Better Delete Revision deletes redundant post revisions from your database as well as other revision-related content like meta data, tags, relationships, and more.
After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can perform optimizations on your WordPress database.
Go to your admin area and click on 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 you can safely delete from your WordPress database …
(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)
A list of revisions stored in your WordPress database will be returned on the screen …
(Posts revisions)
Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to clear all list items from the database …
(Better Delete Revision – Clear posts revisions list)
The redundant data will be removed from the WordPress database …
(List of revisions deleted – Better Delete Revision Manager)
As WordPress automatically saves all revisions, the process will automatically start again. 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 …
(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)
You can also use this plugin to keep the database optimized …
(Better Delete Revision Manager – Optimize your database)
Better Delete Revision checks to see if your WordPress database needs to be optimized and provides a one-click table optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your hosting panel …
(Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click optimization maintenance routine)
For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision WordPress Plugin
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you remove unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (with the added option of keeping an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click WordPress database optimization routine, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:
- Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
- Delete unused tags
- Delete ’orphan post meta items’
- Exclude certain tables or even specific posts/pages from optimization
- Create a log file of the optimizations
- And more!
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin – Settings Panel)
For more details, go here: Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin
WP Optimize
(WP Optimize Plugin)
In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning unnecessary page and post revisions and performing table cleaning and optimization routines, this plugin also lets you perform database maintenance tasks like:
- Enable/Disable comments for published posts
- Removal of trashed comments
- Mobile device friendly
- Remove transient options
- Clear out post trash
- Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
- Add or remove link on WP admin bar
- Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
- See database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
- E-mail notifications on scheduled database cleanups
- Highlights potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
- And more!
(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings)
For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin
WP Sweep
(WP Sweep Plugin)
In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary revisions, WP Sweep also cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Unapproved comments
- Orphan post meta
- Duplicated term meta
- Transient options
- And more!
(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)
For more details, go here: WP Sweep
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 Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …
(Plugins Menu – Add New Plugins)
We hope that you have found the above information on plugins that will help you manage your WordPress post revisions useful.
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org
***