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 – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and save your pages/posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions for the content in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions section below the post or page …

(View the WordPress post revisions list – Post Editor section)

For most users, having access to effective workflow functions like autosave and revisions is a timesaver. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

(Your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 50 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing up to 1,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 100MB.

The good news is that there are various free plugins to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your database as well as other database content associated with each revision such as meta information, relationships, tags, and more.

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

In the main menu section of your admin area, choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Settings Menu)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions you can safely delete from your WP database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Posts revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to clear all list items from the WordPress database, or select ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to exit the page with all post revisions undeleted …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Delete posts revisions list)

The redundant post revisions will be cleared from the WP database …

(List of post revisions removed)

As WordPress automatically saves your new revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off). After a period of time, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins saving your new post revisions again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize the site’s database …

(Optimize the site’s database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database tables need to be optimized and lets you run a one-click optimization routine without requiring you to log into your hosting panel or use complicated applications …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you prune unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click database table optimization routine, it also lets you do database maintenance tasks such as:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude certain tables and/or specific pages/posts 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 Plugin

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning unnecessary revisions of posts and pages and checking if your database needs to be optimized, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to keep 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
• Receive email notifications on automatic database cleanup
• Marks dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep WordPress Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphan term meta
• Duplicated post meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WPSweep Plugin – Settings Panel)

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

For 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 …

(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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