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 Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and update a post/page, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions box below the post or page …

(View the WordPress post revisions list)

Having access to content workflow functions like autosave and revisions is no doubt a great thing. If you write and edit often, however, the 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.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if you have 50 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing up to 1,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 100MB.

The good news is that there are a few great plugins for WordPress that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WP Plugin)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and other revision-related content like tags, relationships, meta data, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can optimize your database without having to log into your server.

Go to the Dashboard and choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of post revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(Clear list of post revisions)

The redundant post revisions will be deleted from the WordPress database …

(Revisions cleared)

After a period of time, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin saving all new revisions again …

(WordPress automatically begins to store all new revisions again!)

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

(Keep your database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if the WP database tables need optimization and provides an easy one-click optimization maintenance routine without the need to log into your server control panel …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click optimization routine)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP 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 a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if the database tables need to be optimized, it also lets you do the following optional tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin)

In addition to removing redundant page and post revisions and checking if the WordPress database tables need optimization, WP Optimize also lets you perform maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Removal of stale spam comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• 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 after automatic database cleanup
• Highlights dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize WP Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned term meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP-Sweep – Settings Panel)

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

For more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Post Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New Plugins)

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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