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.

Content Revision Management 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 your content editor …

(Post Editor screen – The WordPress revisions box)

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

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if you have 100 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing up to 1,500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,500 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 150MB.

The good news is that there are various free plugins available that can help you control and 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 Plugin)

This plugin removes redundant revisions of posts from your database as well as other revision-related content like meta data, tags, relationships, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can perform optimizations on your database.

Log into your WordPress admin section, then go to the admin navigation menu and choose select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager screen. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate the number of redundant post revisions you can remove from the database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

A table of revisions stored in your 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! …’ below the list to clear all items from your WP database …

(Delete list of post revisions)

The unnecessary post information will be removed from your database …

(List of revisions removed – Better Delete Revision)

As WordPress automatically saves post revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you have turned the feature off). After a period of time, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as light as possible …

(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)

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

(Keep your WP database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if the WordPress database tables need optimization and provides a one-click database table optimization function without the need to log into your hosting control panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the WordPress database tables need optimization)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you remove unnecessary page and post revisions (with the option to keep an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you perform the following optional maintenance tasks:

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

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

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize WP Plugin)

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

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Removal of trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• See database table statistics
• Receive email notifications on automatic database cleanup
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep WP Plugin)

In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary post revisions, this plugin also cleans up:

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

(WPSweep – WordPress 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 “Manage Post Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Add Plugin – 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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