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 Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you update a post/page, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions section at the bottom of the content editor …

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

For most WordPress users, having autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt something that helps make work more productive. If you write often, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

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

For example, if you have 100 posts on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions your database could be storing an extra 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions, the total space wasted is about 200MB.

The good news is that there are several free WordPress plugins that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WP Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database as well as other revision-related content such as meta data, tags, relationships, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can use it to perform optimizations on your WP database without having to log into your server.

Log into your WordPress Dashboard and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate how many redundant post revisions can be safely deleted from the database …

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions associated with each post entry, the plugin displays a table of revisions stored in the WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – List of post revisions)

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

(Clear list of revisions)

The unnecessary data will be deleted from the database …

(Better Delete Revision – Post revisions list deleted)

After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins saving your revisions again (unless you specifically turn the feature off) …

(WordPress will automatically begin storing your revisions again!)

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

(Keep the site’s database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if your WP database tables need to be optimized and provides a one-click WP database table optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your hosting panel or use technical database management tools …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase 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 checks if your database tables need to be optimized, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Panel)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to removing redundant revisions of posts and pages and performing cleaning and optimization maintenance routines, WP Optimize also lets you perform database maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove 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
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• Receive email notifications on automatic database cleanup
• Highlights potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep WP Plugin)

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

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

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings Page)

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 WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Plugins Menu – Add New 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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