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 Using Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and update posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions list below the content editor …

(The post revisions box – Post Editor screen)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help create a more effective workflow. If you write extensively, however, over time the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

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

For example, if you have 200 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions your database could be storing up to 4,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 4,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 400MB.

Fortunately, there are various plugins for WordPress available to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

This plugin removes redundant revisions of posts from your database and database content belonging to each revision like tags, meta information, relationships, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, the plugin can optimize your WordPress database.

In your Dashboard, select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Settings)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions related to each post, the plugin will then calculate and display a table of revisions stored in the database …

(List of revisions)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Clear list of revisions)

The unnecessary post information will be removed from the database …

(List of revisions cleared)

After some time has passed and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins to save your new revisions again …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your WordPress database …

(Keep the database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if the database tables need optimization and lets you perform an easy one-click table optimization maintenance routine without the need to log into your server panel or use technical software …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click optimization maintenance routine)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision 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 redundant revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you do the following optional maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude selected tables or specific posts/pages from optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to cleaning redundant revisions of posts and pages and checking if the database needs to be cleaned and optimized, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Remove akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Removal of all transient options
• Clear out post trash
• 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 schedules of optimization
• See database table statistics
• Receive email notifications on scheduled database cleanup
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize WordPress Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary revisions, WP Sweep also cleans up:

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

(WP-Sweep WordPress Plugin – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep WordPress 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 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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