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 create, edit, and update your pages/posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions box below the post or page …
(Viewing the WordPress revisions list)
For most WordPress users, having access to content workflow features like autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt a timesaver. If you write extensively, however, the revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.
(Post revisions can really add up after a while)
For example, if you have 100 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing an extra 1,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 100MB.
The good news is that there are a few great WordPress plugins to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are some of these:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and other revision-related content like meta data, relationships, tags, 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.
In the admin area, select Settings > Better Delete Revision …
(WP Settings – Better Delete Revision)
This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate how many redundant post revisions you can safely delete from your WordPress database …
(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)
A table of post revisions stored in the database will be returned on the screen …
(Posts revisions – Better Delete Revision)
Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button to remove all list items from your WP database …
(Clear list of revisions)
The redundant post revisions will be removed from your WP database …
(List of post revisions cleared – Better Delete Revision)
As WordPress automatically stores all new revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off). After a period of time and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible …
(Post revisions automatically start again!)
Like the other plugins described further below, you can also use this plugin to optimize your site’s database …
(Optimize the site’s database – Better Delete Revision Manager)
The plugin checks to see if your WP database tables need to be optimized and provides a one-click database optimization maintenance routine without the need to log into your server control panel …
(Better Delete Revision checks if your WP database needs to be optimized)
For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)
OptimizeDatabase not only lets you remove unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (with the added option to keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click database optimization routine, it also lets you perform database maintenance tasks like:
- Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
- Delete unused tags
- Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
- 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 WP Plugin
WP-Optimize
(WP-Optimize Plugin)
In addition to performing tasks such as removing redundant revisions of posts and pages and performing database cleaning and optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you perform maintenance tasks such as:
- Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
- Removal of akismet metadata from comments
- Mobile device friendly
- Remove all transient options
- Clean up auto draft posts
- Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
- Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
- Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
- Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
- E-mail notifications on automatic cleanups
- Marks potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
- And more!
(WP Optimize WP Plugin – Settings)
For more details, go here: WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin
WP Sweep
(WP-Sweep)
WP Sweep lets you clean up orphaned, unused, and duplicated data in the WP database, including revisions. This plugin cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Deleted comments
- Orphaned term relationships
- Duplicated user meta
- Transient options
- And more!
(WPSweep – 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
In addition to the above plugins, you can view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Post Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …
(Add New Plugins – 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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