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 save a page/post, WordPress begins to store new revisions of your content in its database. These appear in a Revisions box at the bottom of your post editor …

(The revisions list – Post Editor screen)

Having autosave and revisions is something that can help make work more efficient. If you write extensively, however, over time the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase 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 you have 100 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing up to 1,500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,500 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 150MB.

The good news is that there are various plugins for WordPress available that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Let’s take a look at a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database as well as database content belonging to each revision such as meta information, tags, relationships, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can optimize your database.

Go to the WP Dashboard and select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

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 …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

A table of revisions stored in your WP database will display on the screen …

(List of post revisions)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Clear posts revisions)

The unnecessary revisions will be deleted from the database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Revisions cleared)

After a period of time, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to store your post revisions again (unless you specifically turn the feature off) …

(WordPress will automatically begin to save all revisions again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use the plugin to keep the WordPress database optimized …

(Keep the database optimized – Better Delete Revision)

The plugin checks to see if the database needs to be optimized and performs a one-click table optimization routine without requiring you to log into your hosting panel or mess with complicated tools …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision 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 prune unnecessary page and post revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click database optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following optional maintenance tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

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

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove 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 schedules of optimization
• View database table statistics
• Receive email notifications after automatic database cleanups
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings Screen)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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

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

(WP Sweep – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep – WordPress 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

For 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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