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 your posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions box at the bottom of the post or page …

(Post Editor screen – View the post revisions box)

Having workflow functions like autosave and automatic revisions is a good thing. If you write or edit extensively, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

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

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and other database content associated with each revision such as meta data, tags, relationships, and more.

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

In the admin menu area, click on 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 can be safely deleted from your database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions belonging to each post, the plugin displays a table of post revisions stored in the WP database …

(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(Clear posts revisions list)

The unnecessary items will be removed from your database …

(Post revisions list removed)

After a while, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins storing your post revisions again (unless you specifically turn the feature off) …

(WordPress will automatically begin to store all new revisions again!)

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

(Optimize the database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WordPress database tables need optimization and provides an easy one-click table optimization function that does not require you to log into your server panel or mess with complicated software …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the WP 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 WP Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only lets you delete unnecessary page and post revisions (with the option to keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if your WP database tables need cleaning and optimization, it also lets you perform the following optional maintenance tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting unnecessary post and page revisions and performing table cleaning and optimization routines, WP Optimize also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• Receive email notifications after automatic database cleanups
• Highlights potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned term meta
• Duplicated post meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WPSweep – 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

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 type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(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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