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 Post Revisions – WordPress Plugins

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

(The post revisions list – Post Editor screen)

Having workflow functions like autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt a timesaver. If you write and edit often, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat 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 published on your site and each post has an average of 10 revisions your database could be storing up to 1,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 100MB.

Fortunately, there are a number of free WordPress plugins to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your database and other revision-related content such as tags, meta information, relationships, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use the Better Delete Revision Manager to perform optimizations on your WP database without having to log into your server.

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

(Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(Posts revisions)

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

(Delete list of post revisions)

The redundant revisions will be cleared from your WP database …

(Revisions list deleted)

After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin saving all new revisions again …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Keep the WP database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if your database needs to be optimized and lets you run a one-click optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your server control panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the WP database tables need to be optimized)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin)

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

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• 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 Plugin

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to removing unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and checking if your database tables need cleaning and optimization, this plugin also lets you perform database maintenance tasks such as:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove spam comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• E-mail notifications after automatic database cleanups
• Displays dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

WP-Sweep lets you clean up duplicated, orphaned, and unused data in your WP database, including revisions. This plugin cleans up:

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned user meta
• Duplicated post 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 WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Manage Post Revisions“, “Optimize“, 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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