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.

Revision Management WordPress Plugins

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

(Post Editor section – The Revisions box)

Having functions like autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt very useful. If you write extensively, however, over time 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 you have 200 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions your WordPress database could be storing up to 4,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 4,000 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 400MB.

The good news is that there are several plugins for WordPress that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

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

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use it to optimize your database.

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

(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions related to each post entry, the plugin return a list of revisions stored in the WP database …

(List of revisions – Better Delete Revision)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to delete the items from your WP database, or abandon the process and exit the page …

(Remove list of post revisions)

The unnecessary post revisions will be removed from the WP database …

(Revisions list deleted)

As WordPress automatically stores your post revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you have turned the feature off). After a while, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible …

(WordPress will automatically begin storing your revisions again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your database …

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

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your WP database tables need to be optimized and lets you perform a one-click optimization routine that does not require you to log into your hosting control panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you prune unnecessary page and post revisions (with the option to keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click cleaning and optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you do maintenance tasks such as:

• Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude certain tables or even specific posts/pages from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

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

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize WordPress Plugin)

In addition to deleting unnecessary post and page revisions and performing cleaning and optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you perform maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Remove trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove transient options
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to retain 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
• E-mail notifications on automatic cleanups
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep)

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

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

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress

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 search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Database 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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