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 Revisions Using Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and update a page/post, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions section at the bottom of your content editor …

(Post Editor section – Viewing the WordPress revisions list)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt features that help create a more productive workflow. If you write or edit a lot of content, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 100 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing up to 2,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 200MB.

Fortunately, there are several plugins available to help you control and manage 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 For WordPress)

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

After installing and activating the plugin, you can use the plugin to optimize your WP database without having to log into your server.

In the Dashboard menu, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post entry, the plugin calculates and displays a list of revisions stored in the database …

(List of revisions)

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

(Remove list of post revisions – Better Delete Revision)

The redundant items will be removed from the database …

(Post revisions list deleted)

As WordPress automatically saves post revisions, the process will automatically start again. After a period of time, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WordPress database as lean as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins to store all new post revisions again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep your database optimized …

(Optimize the WordPress database – Better Delete Revision)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database needs to be optimized and lets you perform an easy one-click WordPress database table optimization routine without the need to log into your hosting panel …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only can be used to delete redundant revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if the database needs to be optimized, it also lets you do the following:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin Settings Screen)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting redundant revisions of pages and posts and checking if your WordPress database needs to be cleaned and optimized, WP Optimize also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Remove all transient options
• Clear out post trash
• 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 after automatic cleanup
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin)

WP-Sweep allows you to clean up orphaned, unused, and duplicated data in the WordPress database, including revisions. This plugin cleans up:

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

(WP Sweep Plugin – Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep 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 WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Manage Post Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(Plugins Menu – Add New)

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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