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 Plugins

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

(WordPress revisions box)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more efficient. If you write or edit often, however, over time the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow 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 200 posts on your site and each post has an average of 10 revisions you could be storing up to 2,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 200MB.

Fortunately, there are a few great WordPress plugins that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

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

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

In your WordPress Dashboard menu, choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions associated with each post entry, the plugin will then calculate and return a table of post revisions stored in the database …

(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(Delete list of post revisions)

The redundant items will be cleared from the WordPress database …

(Post revisions list deleted – Better Delete Revision)

After a while and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin storing all revisions again …

(WordPress will automatically begin storing your post revisions again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use the plugin to optimize your WP database …

(Keep your database optimized)

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

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click table optimization routine)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you delete redundant page and post revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if your database needs to be cleaned and optimized, it also lets you perform the following:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings Page)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and checking if the database needs cleaning and optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Remove trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• See database table statistics
• Receive email notifications on scheduled cleanup
• Highlights dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize WP Plugin – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep WP Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphaned term relationships
• Duplicated comment meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WPSweep Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep

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

(Add New 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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