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 Content Revisions Using Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and update posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions section at the bottom of the content editor …

(Post Editor section – The WordPress post revisions box)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more productive. If you write often, however, the number of revisions can start to build 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 on your site and each post has an average of 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 database space wasted is about 200MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin removes redundant post revisions from your database as well as other revision-related content such as relationships, meta data, tags, and more.

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

In your WP Dashboard, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Settings Menu)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate the number of redundant post revisions you can remove from the WordPress database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(List of post revisions)

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

(Delete list of revisions)

The redundant revisions will be removed from your database …

(Post revisions list deleted)

As WordPress automatically saves all post revisions, the process will automatically start again. After some time has passed and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website and their related post revisions, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as lean as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins saving your new revisions again!)

Like the other plugins described in this section, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your WP database …

(Keep the site’s database optimized – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The plugin checks to see if your WP database needs optimization and provides an easy one-click database optimization function that does not require you to log into your hosting control panel …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you prune redundant revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if the database needs to be optimized, it also lets you do the following optional tasks:

• Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude selected posts/pages and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Screen)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize WP Plugin)

In addition to removing redundant revisions of posts and pages and checking if the database needs optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do database maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• 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 scheduling
• Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications after scheduled cleanup
• Marks dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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

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

(WPSweep – WordPress Plugin Settings Page)

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

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 “Post Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Add Plugin – 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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