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 edit and save posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions list below your content editor …

(Post revisions box)

Having autosave and revisions is undoubtedly a great thing. If you write or edit extensively, however, after a while the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(Your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 200 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 10 revisions your database could be storing an extra 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 200MB.

Fortunately, there are some great (and free) plugins for WordPress available that can 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 – WordPress Plugin)

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

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can perform optimizations on your database without having to log into your server.

Log into the administration area and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WP Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate how many redundant post revisions can be safely deleted from your WordPress database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

A list of revisions stored in the WP database will display on the screen …

(Better Delete Revision – List of revisions)

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

(Remove posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision)

The redundant revisions will be deleted from the WordPress database …

(Revisions list cleared)

As WordPress automatically stores your post revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you have turned the feature off). After some time has passed and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website and their related post revisions, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your 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 optimize your WP database …

(Optimize your database – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The plugin checks to see if the WP database tables need to be optimized and provides a one-click table optimization maintenance routine without the need to log into your server panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the database tables need to be optimized)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only lets you delete redundant revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click WP database optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize WP Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and checking if the database tables need optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove stale spam comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Removal of all transient options
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• Display database table statistics
• Receive email notifications after scheduled database cleanups
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin)

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

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

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings Page)

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 WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add Plugin)

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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