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.

Post/Page Revision Management Using Plugins

As soon as you edit and update your pages/posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions section at the bottom of the page editor …

(Post Editor section – Viewing the Revisions box)

For most WordPress users, having access to content workflow features like autosave and automatic revisions is very useful. If you write a lot of content, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

(As you write more posts on your site, your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if there are 100 posts published on your site and each post has 10 revisions you could be storing around 1,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions, the total space wasted is about 100MB.

The good news is that there are various WordPress plugins available to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your database as well as other revision-related content like meta information, relationships, tags, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use it to optimize your WP database without having to log into your server.

Log into the WordPress Dashboard and select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings Menu – 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 you can safely remove from the database …

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to remove all list items from the WP database, or cancel the task and exit the page with all post revisions undeleted …

(Remove list of revisions – Better Delete Revision)

The redundant revisions will be removed from the database …

(Post revisions list deleted)

After some time has passed, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to save all post revisions again …

(WordPress automatically begins to save your new post revisions again!)

You can also use this plugin to keep your WP database optimized …

(Keep the WordPress database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WordPress database needs to be optimized and provides a one-click WP database table optimization maintenance routine without the need to log into your hosting panel or mess with technical tools …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your WordPress database tables need optimization)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only can be used to remove unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if your WP database needs optimization, it also lets you do the following optional maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude certain tables and specific pages/posts from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning unnecessary revisions of posts and pages and performing table cleaning and optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you do database maintenance tasks such as:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• Receive email notifications on scheduled cleanup
• Highlights dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphaned term relationships
• Duplicated post meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP Sweep Plugin – Settings)

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 WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New 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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