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 edit and save posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions section below the content editor …

(Revisions list – Post Editor section)

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

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 10 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 5 revisions your database could be storing around 500 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 500 revisions, the total space wasted is about 50MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WP Plugin)

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

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

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

(Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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 your database …

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(Posts revisions)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button to delete all list items from your WP database, or select ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to cancel the operation and exit the tool with your post revisions undeleted …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Remove list of post revisions)

The redundant post revisions will be cleared from your WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Revisions list removed)

After a period of time and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin saving post revisions again …

(Post revisions automatically start again!)

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

(Optimize the database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database tables need optimization and provides an easy one-click table optimization maintenance routine without the need to log into your hosting panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you delete redundant revisions of posts and pages (with the added option to keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if the WP database needs cleaning and optimization, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• Exclude certain posts/pages and tables from optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin)

In addition to removing unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and checking if your WordPress database tables need cleaning and optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Removal of trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• Receive email notifications after automatic cleanups
• Displays dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize WordPress Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WP-Sweep WP Plugin – Settings Page)

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

To view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(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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