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 Using Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and save posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions box below your page or post …

(WordPress revisions box – Post Editor section)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help make work more efficient. If you write or edit extensively, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(Your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

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

Fortunately, there are a number of free plugins that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Let’s take a look at a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

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

After installing and activating the plugin, you can use the Better Delete Revision Manager to perform optimizations on your WordPress database without having to log into your server.

In the WP Dashboard menu, select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be removed from your WP database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

A list of revisions stored in your WP database will display on the screen …

(List of revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ below the list to clear the items from the database, or exit the tool with your post revisions undeleted …

(Clear posts revisions)

The redundant items will be deleted from the database …

(Revisions deleted)

After some time has passed and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WordPress database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin saving all post revisions again …

(WordPress automatically begins storing post revisions again!)

You can also use this plugin to keep the WordPress database optimized …

(Keep your site’s database optimized – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database needs to be optimized and lets you perform an easy one-click optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your server control panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the WP database tables need to be optimized)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to prune redundant page and post revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if your database tables need to be trimmed, cleaned, and optimized, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude selected posts/pages and tables from optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Panel)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize)

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

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Remove stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Removal of all 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 schedules of optimization
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications on automatic cleanups
• Highlights potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings Page)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

WP Sweep allows you to clean up duplicated, orphaned, and unused data in your WordPress database, including revisions. This plugin cleans up:

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

(WP Sweep Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep 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 database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Add Plugins – 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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