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 Content Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and save your pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions section below your post editor …

(Post Editor section – The WordPress revisions list)

Having access to effective workflow functions like autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt very useful. If you write extensively, however, the revisions can start building up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if you have 100 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing an extra 1,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 100MB.

Fortunately, there are a few great plugins available to help you control 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)

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

After installing and activating the plugin, you can optimize your database without having to log into your server.

Log into the Dashboard and select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate how many redundant post revisions you can safely delete from the database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

A list of post revisions stored in your database will display on the screen …

(List of revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(Delete posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision)

The unnecessary revisions will be cleared from your WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision – List of revisions cleared)

As WordPress automatically saves all new post revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off). After a while and depending on the amount of content you have published on your site and their associated post revisions, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start again!)

Like the other plugins described further below, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize the site’s database …

(Better Delete Revision – Optimize the WP database)

The plugin checks to see if your WP database needs optimization and lets you run a one-click WordPress database optimization routine that does not require you to log into your hosting control panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you delete unnecessary post and page revisions (with the option to keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if your WP database needs cleaning and optimization, it also lets you perform database maintenance tasks like:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude certain tables or even specific pages/posts from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

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

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting redundant revisions of pages and posts and performing database cleaning and optimization routines, WP Optimize also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove spam comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Remove all transient options
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• Receive email notifications after scheduled cleanup
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize WP Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WP-Sweep WP Plugin – Settings)

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

To view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, 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.

***

***