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 save posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions list at the bottom of your post editor …

(WordPress post revisions list)

Having workflow features like autosave and revisions is no doubt a timesaver. If you write often, however, the revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

(As post revisions accumulate, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

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

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

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

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

Go to your Dashboard and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions belonging to each post entry, the plugin will then calculate and display a list of post revisions stored in your WordPress database …

(List of post revisions – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Delete list of revisions – Better Delete Revision)

The redundant data will be deleted from your WP database …

(Post revisions list deleted)

After a period of time and depending on the amount of content you have published on your site, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to store your post revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …

(WordPress will automatically begin saving all revisions again!)

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

(Optimize your site’s database)

The plugin checks to see if your WordPress database tables need to be optimized and lets you perform a one-click optimization maintenance routine without the need to log into your server panel or use technical software …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you prune unnecessary page and post revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click WordPress database table cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following:

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

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

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting redundant page and post revisions and performing optimization routines, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Remove trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• Receive email notifications on scheduled database cleanups
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphan user meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP Sweep – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep WP 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 database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Plugins Menu – Add Plugins)

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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