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 save a post/page, WordPress begins to store revisions for the content in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions list below the post editor …

(Post revisions list)

For most users, having autosave and automatic revisions is undoubtedly a great thing. If you write and edit often, however, after a while the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(As post revisions accumulate, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 250 posts on your site and each post has an average of 10 revisions you could be storing around 2,500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,500 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 250MB.

The good news is that there are a number of free plugins for WordPress available to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Let’s take a look at a few of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your database and database content belonging to each revision such as relationships, tags, meta data, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use it to optimize your WordPress database.

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

(Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of post revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ below the list to clear the items from the database, or choose the ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ button to exit the plugin settings page …

(Remove posts revisions list)

The unnecessary items will be deleted from the database …

(Better Delete Revision – Revisions list deleted)

As WordPress automatically saves your revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you have turned the feature off). After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website and their related post revisions, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins saving all revisions again!)

Like the other plugins described further below, you can also use the plugin to keep your database optimized …

(Better Delete Revision – Optimize your database)

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

(Better Delete Revision checks if your WordPress database tables need optimization)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you delete redundant post and page revisions (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you perform optional maintenance tasks like:

• Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude certain posts/pages and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Screen)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin)

In addition to deleting unnecessary revisions of posts and pages and performing optimization routines, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Remove all transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications on scheduled database cleanups
• Displays dangerous cleanup items 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 unused, duplicated, and orphaned data in your database, including post revisions. This plugin cleans up:

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphan comment meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP Sweep – WordPress Plugin Settings Page)

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

To view 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 Database“, etc …

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New Plugins)

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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