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 Post Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and update pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions section below your content editor …

(Post Editor screen – Viewing the revisions box)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt features that help create a more productive workflow. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat 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 there are 300 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing an extra 6,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 6,000 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 600MB.

The good news is that there are some great free plugins available that can help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant revisions of posts from your database and database content belonging to each revision like relationships, tags, meta information, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, the plugin can perform optimizations on your database without having to log into your server.

Go to your Dashboard and select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to clear the items from your WP database, or cancel the process and exit the plugin with all post revisions undeleted …

(Clear posts revisions)

The unnecessary post revisions will be cleared from your database …

(Post revisions list deleted)

As WordPress automatically saves your post revisions, the process will automatically begin again. After a while and depending on the amount of content you have published on your site and their associated post revisions, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as lean as possible …

(Revisions automatically start again!)

Like the other plugins listed in this section, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize the database …

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

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database tables need optimization and lets you run a one-click optimization maintenance routine that does not require you to log into your server panel …

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

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

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 redundant page and post revisions (with the added option to keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click table optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you perform the following optional tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• Exclude selected tables and specific pages/posts from optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

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

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to removing unnecessary revisions of posts and pages and performing table cleaning and optimization routines, this plugin also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Remove stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• Display database table statistics
• E-mail notifications on automatic database cleanups
• Marks dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings Screen)

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

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep)

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

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

(WP Sweep WP Plugin – Settings)

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

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

(Plugins Menu – Add Plugin)

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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