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 save posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions for your content in its database. These show up in a Revisions section at the bottom of the page editor …

(Post Editor section – The WordPress revisions list)

For most WordPress users, having autosave and automatic revisions is a timesaver. If you write and edit often, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(As you write more posts, 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 your database could be storing up to 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions, the total space wasted is about 200MB.

Fortunately, there are various free plugins to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

This plugin removes redundant post revisions from your database and database content associated with each revision like relationships, meta data, tags, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can perform optimizations on your WP database.

In the main menu of your Dashboard, choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

A table of revisions stored in the WP database will be returned on the screen …

(List of revisions)

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

(Delete list of revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The redundant items will be cleared from the WP database …

(List of post revisions deleted – Better Delete Revision Manager)

After some time has passed and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website and their associated post revisions, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins storing all new revisions again (unless you specifically turn the feature off) …

(WordPress will automatically begin saving your new post revisions again!)

You can also use this plugin to optimize your WordPress database …

(Keep the site’s database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WP database tables need optimization and provides a one-click optimization function without requiring you to log into your hosting panel or use complicated applications …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you prune redundant post and page revisions (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if your WordPress database tables need optimization, it also lets you do the following optional maintenance tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

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

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• View database table statistics
• Receive email notifications after automatic cleanup
• Highlights dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress – 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

To view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(Add New – WordPress Plugins Menu)

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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