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 Content Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you update pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions for the content in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions list below the content editor …

(Post Editor section – Viewing the WordPress revisions box)

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

(Your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 200 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing an extra 3,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 3,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 300MB.

Fortunately, there are several WordPress plugins to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and database content related to each revision such as meta data, tags, relationships, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, Better Delete Revision can optimize your database.

Log into your WordPress dashboard, then go to your navigation menu and choose click on 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 safely remove from the database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions associated with each post entry, the plugin calculates and returns a table of post revisions stored in your WordPress database …

(Posts revisions list)

Click on the button below the list to remove all items from the WP database, or choose ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to abandon the process and exit the plugin …

(Delete list of post revisions)

The unnecessary revisions will be deleted from the database …

(Post revisions list removed)

As WordPress automatically saves all new post revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you have turned the feature off). After a period of time and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your database …

(Keep your database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database needs optimization and provides a one-click WP database optimization maintenance routine that does not require you to log into your server control panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your database needs to be optimized)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

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 posts and pages (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if your WP database tables need cleaning and optimization, it also lets you do maintenance tasks like:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin – Settings Panel)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin)

In addition to removing redundant page and post revisions and checking if your database tables need cleaning and optimization, this plugin also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Removal of stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain 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
• E-mail notifications after automatic database cleanup
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphaned post meta
• Duplicated post meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP Sweep Plugin – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep

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 “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Plugins Menu – Add Plugin)

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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