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 save pages and posts, 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 section – The WordPress revisions box)

For most users, having autosave and revisions is undoubtedly a good thing. If you write a lot of content, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

(As you write more posts, your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if there are 200 posts on your site and each post has an average of 10 revisions you could be storing an extra 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 200MB.

Fortunately, there are some really great (and free) plugins for WordPress available that can help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database as well as other revision-related content like tags, relationships, meta information, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use it to optimize your database without having to log into your server.

In your Dashboard, select 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 how many redundant post revisions can be safely deleted from the database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Posts revisions)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Delete list of revisions)

The unnecessary data will be deleted from your WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Post revisions removed)

As WordPress automatically stores post revisions, the process will automatically start again. After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as lean as possible …

(Revisions automatically start again!)

You can also use the plugin to keep your database optimized …

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

The plugin checks to see if your WP database needs optimization and provides an easy one-click database table optimization routine without the need to log into your server control panel or use complicated database management applications …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you remove unnecessary page and post revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if your WordPress database needs optimization, it also lets you perform the following optional tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude certain tables or specific pages/posts from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to cleaning redundant revisions of posts and pages and checking if the database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, this plugin also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• 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
• Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• E-mail notifications after scheduled cleanups
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned user meta
• Duplicated user meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WPSweep WordPress Plugin – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep – WordPress 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 “Post Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(Add Plugin – 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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