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.

Revision Management WordPress Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and update a page/post, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions section below your post or page …

(Viewing the revisions list)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more productive. If you write and edit often, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly grow 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 up to 2,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 200MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

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

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

Go to your Dashboard and select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings Menu)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be safely removed from the WP database …

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post entry, the plugin calculates and returns a table of revisions stored in your WP database …

(List of revisions)

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

(Delete posts revisions – Better Delete Revision)

The redundant revisions will be cleared from your WordPress database …

(List of revisions removed)

After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin saving all new revisions again (unless you specifically turn the feature off) …

(WordPress automatically begins to store all new revisions again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use the plugin to keep your site’s database optimized …

(Optimize the WP database – Better Delete Revision)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your WP database tables need to be optimized and runs an easy one-click optimization routine that does not require you to log into your server panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to remove unnecessary post and page revisions (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if your database needs cleaning and optimization, it also lets you perform maintenance tasks like:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude selected posts/pages and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize WP Plugin)

In addition to cleaning redundant page and post revisions and performing optimization routines, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Remove stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• Display database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after automatic cleanup
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings Page)

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

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep WordPress Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphaned comment meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WPSweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

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 database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Add Plugin – 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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