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 Revisions Using Plugins

As soon as you edit and update posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions box at the bottom of the content editor …

(Post Editor screen – The post revisions box)

Having autosave and automatic revisions is undoubtedly very useful. If you write or edit extensively, however, over time the revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

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

For example, if you have 100 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing up to 2,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 200MB.

Fortunately, there are various free plugins for WordPress available that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and other revision-related content such as 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 database.

In your WP Dashboard menu, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to delete all list items from your database, or abandon the process and exit the page with your post revisions undeleted …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Delete posts revisions)

The redundant revisions will be deleted from your WordPress database …

(Post revisions removed – Better Delete Revision)

After some time has passed, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to save all revisions again …

(Revisions automatically start again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the site’s database optimized …

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

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database tables need to be optimized and lets you perform a one-click optimization maintenance routine that does not require 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 – WordPress Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to remove unnecessary post and page revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if the database needs cleaning and optimization, it also lets you do maintenance tasks such as:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to deleting unnecessary post and page revisions and performing optimization routines, WP Optimize also lets you perform maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Removal of stale spam comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Remove transient options
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• View database table statistics
• Receive email notifications on automatic cleanups
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

WP-Sweep lets you clean up duplicated, unused, and orphaned data in your WP database, including post revisions. This plugin cleans up:

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphaned user meta
• Duplicated user meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WPSweep – Settings)

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 type in keywords like “Manage Post Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Plugins Menu – Add New 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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