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 Revisions Using Plugins

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

(The post revisions list – Post Editor section)

For most WordPress users, having autosave and automatic revisions is undoubtedly a good thing. If you write a lot of content, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

(As post revisions accumulate, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 250 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing around 2,500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,500 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 250MB.

The good news is that there are a number of plugins for WordPress to 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)

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

After installing and activating the plugin, you can use it to perform optimizations on your database.

In the Dashboard menu, select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post, the plugin calculates and returns a table of revisions stored in your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Posts revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to clear all list items from your database, or select the ‘No, …’ button to exit the plugin with your post revisions undeleted …

(Clear posts revisions list)

The redundant post information will be removed from your database …

(Revisions list deleted – Better Delete Revision)

After a period of time and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website and their associated post revisions, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins saving post revisions again …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

Like the other plugins described further below, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the site’s database optimized …

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

The plugin checks to see if your database needs to be optimized and provides an easy one-click WP database table optimization routine without the need to log into your server control panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your WordPress database needs optimization)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you prune unnecessary page and post revisions (with the added option to keep an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if your database needs optimization, it also lets you perform database maintenance tasks such as:

• Delete trashed comments, pages, and posts
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude selected posts/pages and tables from optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to cleaning unnecessary post and page revisions and performing WordPress database cleaning and optimization routines, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Remove unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• Display database table statistics
• Receive email notifications on scheduled cleanups
• Highlights dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep WP Plugin)

WP-Sweep lets you clean up duplicated, orphaned, and unused data in your database, including post revisions. This plugin cleans up:

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

(WP Sweep – WordPress Plugin Settings Screen)

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

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“, etc …

(Add New – 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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