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 – WordPress Plugins
As soon as you update pages and posts, WordPress begins to store revisions for the content in its database. These appear in a Revisions list below your content editor …
(Post revisions box)
Having effective workflow features like autosave and revisions is undoubtedly a timesaver. If you write and edit often, 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 on your site and each post has 20 revisions you could be storing an extra 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 200MB.
Fortunately, there are a number of free plugins available to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)
Better Delete Revision removes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and other revision-related content such as meta information, tags, relationships, and more.
After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use the plugin to optimize your WP database without having to log into your server.
Log into your WordPress site, then go to the admin navigation menu and choose choose 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 the number of redundant post revisions you can remove from the WordPress 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 table of post revisions stored in the WordPress database …
(List of revisions)
Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button to delete all list items from your WordPress database …
(Better Delete Revision – Clear list of post revisions)
The redundant post revisions will be deleted from the WordPress database …
(Revisions deleted – Better Delete Revision)
As WordPress automatically stores all revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you specifically turn the feature off). After some time has passed and depending on the amount of content you have published on your site and their associated post revisions, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as lean as possible …
(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)
You can also use this plugin to keep the site’s database optimized …
(Optimize your WP database)
The plugin checks to see if your database tables need to be optimized and provides an easy one-click table optimization routine without the need to log into your hosting panel or mess with complicated database management applications …
(Better Delete Revision checks if your database tables need to be optimized)
For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision WP Plugin
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)
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 a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you do the following optional maintenance tasks:
- Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
- Delete unused tags
- Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
- Exclude selected posts/pages and tables from cleaning and optimization
- Automatically schedule optimizations
- And more!
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Screen)
For more details, go here: Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
WP-Optimize
(WP Optimize WordPress Plugin)
In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning redundant revisions of posts and pages and checking if your database tables need to be optimized, WP Optimize also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:
- Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
- Remove trashed comments
- Mobile device friendly
- Remove all transient options
- Clean up auto draft posts
- Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
- Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
- Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
- Display database table statistics
- Receive email notifications after automatic database cleanups
- Marks potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
- And more!
(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)
For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress
WP Sweep
(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)
WP Sweep allows you to clean up unused, orphaned, and duplicated data in your database, including post revisions. This plugin cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Deleted comments
- Orphaned post meta
- Duplicated post meta
- Unused terms
- And more!
(WPSweep – Settings)
For more details, go here: WP-Sweep WP 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 search for keywords like “Manage Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …
(Add New Plugin – 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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