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 update your pages/posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions of your content in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions section at the bottom of the page editor …
(Post Editor screen – View the WordPress revisions box)
Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help create a more productive workflow. If you write a lot of content, however, over time the revisions can start building up. This can significantly bloat 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 you have 100 posts published on your site and each post has 10 revisions 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 of that post, the total database space wasted is about 100MB.
The good news is that there are various free WordPress plugins to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few of these:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision)
Better Delete Revision removes redundant revisions of posts from your database and other revision-related content such as relationships, tags, meta data, and more.
After installing and activating the plugin, you can optimize your WP database without having to log into your server.
In your Dashboard menu, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …
(WP Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)
This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate the number of redundant post revisions you can safely remove 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 returns a table of post revisions stored in the database …
(List of revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)
Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to remove all items from your database …
(Delete list of revisions)
The redundant post revisions will be cleared from your WP database …
(Revisions list deleted – Better Delete Revision Manager)
After some time has passed, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin saving all revisions again …
(WordPress will automatically begin to save your new post revisions again!)
Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use this plugin to keep your database optimized …
(Better Delete Revision Manager – Keep the site’s database optimized)
The plugin checks to see if your WordPress database needs optimization and runs a one-click database table optimization routine without the need to log into your server panel …
(Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click optimization routine)
For more details, go here}:
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)
This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you prune unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if your database needs cleaning and optimization, it also lets you do the following optional tasks:
- Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
- Delete unused tags
- Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
- Exclude certain pages/posts and tables from cleaning and optimization
- Automatically schedule optimizations
- And more!
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress – Settings Panel)
For more details, go here}:
WP-Optimize
(WP-Optimize WordPress Plugin)
In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning redundant post and page revisions and checking if the WordPress database needs optimization, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:
- Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
- Remove trashed comments
- Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
- Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
- Clean up auto draft posts
- Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
- Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
- Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
- See database table statistics
- Receive email notifications on automatic database cleanup
- Highlights dangerous cleanup items in red
- And more!
(WP Optimize – Settings)
For more details, go here}:
WP Sweep
(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)
In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary post revisions, this plugin also cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Unapproved comments
- Orphan term relationships
- Duplicated term meta
- Unused terms
- And more!
(WPSweep Plugin – Settings)
For more details, go here}:
For more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …
(Add New Plugins – WordPress 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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This tutorial was created using an earlier version of WordPress and may contain outdated information. Please bookmark this page as we will be updating this tutorial soon! To be notified of updates to our content, subscribe to our updates list (see sidebar), or Like our 
