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 your posts/pages, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions section below the post or page …

(Post Editor screen – The WordPress revisions list)

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

(Your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

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

Fortunately, there are a number of free plugins that can help you control 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 as well as other revision-related content such as meta data, relationships, tags, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can use it to optimize your database.

In the Dashboard, choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WordPress Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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 delete from the database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post entry, the plugin display a list of revisions stored in your WP database …

(Better Delete Revision – Posts revisions list)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Delete posts revisions)

The redundant post information will be removed from the WP database …

(Post revisions list removed)

After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to store all new post revisions again …

(Post revisions automatically start again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use the plugin to keep the site’s database optimized …

(Keep your WordPress database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WordPress database needs to be optimized and provides a one-click optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your hosting control panel or mess with technical database management software …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you remove unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (with the added option of keeping a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if the database needs to be cleaned and optimized, it also lets you do the following optional maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude selected tables or specific posts/pages from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and performing table cleaning and optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• View database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after scheduled database cleanup
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin)

In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary revisions, WP Sweep also cleans up:

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphaned term meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress – 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

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 “Manage Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(WordPress 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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