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 edit and update posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions list below the post editor …
(Post Editor section – View the WordPress revisions list)
Having workflow features like autosave and revisions is a good thing. If you write 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 you have 100 posts on your site and each post has 10 revisions your database could be storing around 1,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 100MB.
Fortunately, there are a few great WordPress plugins that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision WP Plugin)
This plugin removes redundant revisions of posts from your database as well as other revision-related content like meta information, tags, relationships, and more.
After installing and activating the plugin, you can optimize your database.
In your WP Dashboard, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …
(Settings – Better Delete Revision)
This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be safely deleted from the WordPress database …
(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)
A list of post revisions stored in the database will be returned on the screen …
(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision)
Click on the button below the list to clear the items from the WordPress database, or choose ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to cancel the process and exit the tool …
(Clear posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision Manager)
The redundant data will be cleared from the WP database …
(Revisions list cleared)
As WordPress automatically stores your new revisions, the process will automatically start again. After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WordPress database as light as possible …
(Revisions automatically start again!)
Like the other plugins described in this section, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the site’s database optimized …
(Keep your WordPress database optimized)
Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database tables need to be optimized and lets you run an easy one-click WP database optimization routine without the need to log into your hosting control panel or mess with technical database management software …
(Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click database table optimization routine)
For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you remove redundant revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if your WordPress database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, it also lets you do database maintenance tasks such as:
- Delete trashed comments, pages, and posts
- Delete unused tags
- Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
- Exclude selected tables and specific posts/pages from cleaning and optimization
- Create a log file of the optimizations
- And more!
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Screen)
For more details, go here: Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
WP-Optimize
(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress)
In addition to cleaning redundant revisions of pages and posts and checking if the WP database needs to be cleaned and optimized, this plugin also lets you do maintenance tasks such as:
- Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
- Removal of stale spam comments
- Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
- Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
- Clear out the post trash
- Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
- Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
- Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
- See database table statistics
- E-mail notifications after scheduled cleanup
- Highlights dangerous cleanup items in red
- And more!
(WP-Optimize – Settings)
For more details, go here: WP-Optimize WordPress Plugin
WP-Sweep
(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress)
WP-Sweep allows you to clean up orphaned, unused, and duplicated data in your database, including revisions. This plugin cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Spammed comments
- Orphaned term meta
- Duplicated comment meta
- Transient options
- And more!
(WPSweep – WordPress Plugin Settings)
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
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 search for keywords like “Manage Post Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …
(Add New Plugin – 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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