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 a post or page, WordPress begins to store revisions of the content in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions section below your page editor …

(Post Editor section – View the Post revisions list)

Having features like autosave and revisions is no doubt something that helps make work more efficient. If you write extensively, however, after a while the revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 100 posts on your site and each post has 20 revisions your WordPress database could be storing up to 2,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 200MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin removes redundant revisions of posts from your database and other revision-related content like meta data, tags, relationships, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can perform optimizations on your WordPress database.

In the WordPress Dashboard menu, 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 you can safely delete from your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions related to each post, the plugin calculates and displays a table of post revisions stored in your WP database …

(List of post revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to delete all list items from your database, or abandon the task and exit the page with all post revisions undeleted …

(Clear list of revisions – Better Delete Revision)

The redundant post information will be deleted from your WP database …

(List of revisions removed – Better Delete Revision)

As WordPress automatically saves all new revisions, the process will automatically start again. After some time has passed, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible …

(WordPress will automatically begin storing all new post revisions again!)

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

(Keep the database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database needs optimization and provides a one-click WordPress database optimization feature that does not require you to log into your server control panel …

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

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 remove unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (with the option of keeping an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if the WordPress database tables need to be optimized, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude certain tables or even specific posts/pages 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 For WordPress

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize WordPress Plugin)

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

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Remove stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• Receive email notifications after scheduled cleanups
• Highlights potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin)

WP Sweep allows you to clean up unused, duplicated, and orphaned data in the database, including post revisions. This plugin cleans up:

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphan term relationships
• Duplicated term meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WPSweep WordPress Plugin – Settings Screen)

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 type in keywords like “Manage Post Revisions“, “Database 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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