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 create, edit, and save a page or post, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions section below the page editor …

(Post Editor screen – The WordPress post revisions list)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help make work more efficient. If you write and edit often, however, the revisions can start building 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 you have 10 posts on your site with an average of 5 revisions each you could be storing up to 500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 500 revisions, the total space wasted is about 50MB.

Fortunately, there are some really great free WordPress plugins that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your database and other revision-related content like tags, meta information, relationships, and more.

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

In the Dashboard, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WP Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Posts revisions list)

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

(Clear posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The redundant data will be cleared from the database …

(Better Delete Revision – List of revisions deleted)

As WordPress automatically saves post revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off). After some time has passed and depending on the amount of content you have published on your site, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as lean as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins saving your revisions again!)

Like the other plugins listed in this section, you can also use this plugin to optimize the site’s database …

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

The plugin checks to see if the WP database tables need to be optimized and provides an easy one-click table optimization function without requiring you to log into your hosting control panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you delete unnecessary post and page revisions (with the option to keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you do database maintenance tasks such as:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Page)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to performing tasks such as removing redundant page and post revisions and checking if the WP database tables need cleaning and optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove stale spam comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• View database table statistics
• Receive email notifications on automatic cleanups
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep)

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

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

(WPSweep – WordPress Plugin Settings)

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

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“, “Database Optimize“, 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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