WordPress Plugins For Managing WordPress Post Revisions

In this tutorial, we look at a number of WordPress plugins that will help you manage your post revisions.

WordPress Plugins For Managing WordPress Post Revisions

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 are displayed in a Revisions box below the page editor …

Viewing the WordPress post revisions list

(Post Editor section – View the WordPress post revisions box)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more productive. If you write or edit often, however, over time the number of 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.

Your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data

(As post revisions accumulate, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if there are 300 posts published on your site and each post has 20 revisions you could be storing around 6,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 6,000 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 600MB.

Fortunately, there are various plugins for WordPress available to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at some of these:

Better Delete Revision

Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and other revision-related content like relationships, meta data, tags, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use the plugin to optimize your WordPress database.

Go to your WP admin area and choose Settings > Better Delete Revision

Better Delete Revision - Settings Menu

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager screen. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate how many redundant post revisions can be deleted from your WordPress database …

Check Revision Posts - Better Delete Revision

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

A list of revisions stored in the WordPress database will be returned on the screen …

List of revisions

(List of revisions)

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

Clear list of revisions

(Better Delete Revision – Delete list of revisions)

The unnecessary post revisions will be removed from the database …

Revisions list deleted

(Post revisions list deleted)

Practical Tip

After a period of time and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins saving your revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …

WordPress automatically begins storing all new revisions again!

(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)

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

Keep your database optimized

(Optimize your WordPress database – Better Delete Revision)

The plugin checks to see if your WP database needs to be optimized and provides a one-click table optimization maintenance routine without the need to log into your server control panel or use complicated tools …

Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click optimization routine

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click optimization maintenance routine)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only lets you delete unnecessary post and page revisions (with the added option of keeping a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click database table cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you do the following:

  • Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
  • Delete unused tags
  • Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
  • Exclude certain tables or even specific posts/pages from cleaning and optimization
  • Automatically schedule optimizations
  • And more!

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions - WordPress Plugin Settings Page

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

WP Optimize - WordPress Plugin

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning redundant revisions of pages and posts and checking if the WP database tables need to be optimized, WP Optimize also lets you do database maintenance tasks like:

  • Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
  • Remove stale spam comments
  • Mobile device friendly
  • Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
  • Clean up auto draft posts
  • Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
  • Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
  • Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
  • See database table statistics
  • E-mail notifications after scheduled database cleanup
  • Highlights potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
  • And more!

WP Optimize WP Plugin - Settings Panel

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

WP Sweep WordPress Plugin

(WP-Sweep Plugin)

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

  • Auto drafts
  • Unapproved comments
  • Orphan term relationships
  • Duplicated term meta
  • Transient options
  • And more!

WP-Sweep WordPress Plugin - Settings

(WP Sweep – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress

Simple Revisions Delete

Simple Revisions Delete
Simple Revisions Delete – WordPress plugin

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.

Publish box - Revisions: Purge link.
Click the Purge link to delete post revisions from your WordPress database.

For more details, go here: Simple Revisions Delete

WP REVISIONS CONTROL

WP Revisions Control
WP Revisions Control

This plugin lets you specify the number of revisions retained for each post type in the Settings > Writing screen.

WP Revisions Control Settings
WP Revisions Control Settings.

For more details, go here: WP Revisions Control

For more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Manage Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

Add Plugin - WordPress Plugins Menu

(Add Plugins – WordPress Plugins Menu)

We hope that you have found the above information on plugins that will help you manage your WordPress post revisions useful.

WordPress Plugins For Managing WordPress Post Revisions

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