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 Using Plugins

As soon as you update your pages/posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions section below your post editor …

(Post revisions list – Post Editor section)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt functions that help create a more effective workflow. If you write or edit extensively, however, 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.

(Your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 50 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing up to 1,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 100MB.

Fortunately, there are a few great plugins for WordPress to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

This plugin removes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and database content associated with each revision such as relationships, meta data, tags, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, the plugin can perform optimizations on your WP database.

Log into your WordPress dashboard, then go to your navigation menu and select choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(Posts revisions)

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

(Clear posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision)

The redundant post revisions will be removed from your database …

(Revisions list removed – Better Delete Revision)

After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins storing your post revisions again …

(WordPress will automatically begin to save your post revisions again!)

You can also use this plugin to keep your site’s database optimized …

(Optimize your WP database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WordPress database needs to be optimized and provides a one-click table optimization routine that does not require you to log into your server control panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the database needs optimization)

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 remove unnecessary page and post revisions (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you perform the following optional tasks:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• Exclude specific pages/posts 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 Plugin

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin)

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

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Remove akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• Display database table statistics
• Receive email notifications after automatic cleanup
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings Page)

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, WP Sweep also cleans up:

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned user meta
• Duplicated user meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP Sweep WP Plugin – Settings)

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 “Manage Post Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New Plugin)

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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