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 Plugins

As soon as you update your posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions for your content in its database. These appear in a Revisions list at the bottom of the post or page …

(Viewing the WordPress post revisions box – Post Editor section)

For most WordPress users, having features like autosave and automatic revisions is very useful. If you write and edit often, however, over time the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

(Your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 300 posts on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions your database could be storing around 6,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 6,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 600MB.

Fortunately, there are several free plugins to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

This plugin removes redundant post revisions from your database and other database content associated with each revision such as meta information, relationships, tags, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can use the Better Delete Revision Manager to perform optimizations on your WordPress database without having to log into your server.

Log into your WordPress dashboard, then go to your navigation menu and select choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

A list of revisions stored in your database will be returned on the screen …

(Better Delete Revision – Posts revisions)

Click on the button below the list to remove all items from the database …

(Clear list of revisions)

The unnecessary post information will be deleted from the WP database …

(List of revisions removed)

As WordPress automatically stores post revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off). After some time has passed and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website and their associated post revisions, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins to store all new revisions again!)

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

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

The plugin checks to see if the database needs optimization and provides an easy one-click optimization routine without the need to log into your server control panel or use complicated applications …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision – WordPress 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 delete unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click table optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you perform database maintenance tasks like:

• Delete trashed comments, pages, and posts
• 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)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to removing unnecessary revisions of posts and pages and performing table optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove 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 schedules of optimization
• See database table statistics
• E-mail notifications on scheduled cleanups
• Highlights dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize WordPress Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep WP Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphaned post meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

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

(Add New Plugins – 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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