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 create, edit, and update your pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions box at the bottom of your post editor …

(Post Editor screen – The WordPress post revisions box)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt features that help make work more efficient. If you write and edit extensively, however, the revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

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

For example, if there are 100 posts published on your site and each post has 15 revisions you could be storing up to 1,500 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,500 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 150MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and other revision-related content like meta data, 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.

In your WP administration area, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate the number of redundant post revisions you can safely delete from your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of post revisions)

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

(Remove list of revisions)

The redundant data will be deleted from your database …

(List of revisions cleared)

After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin storing all new post revisions again …

(WordPress will automatically begin storing all revisions again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Optimize your database)

The plugin checks to see if the WP database needs optimization and lets you run an easy one-click database table optimization routine without requiring you to log into your server control panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the 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)

OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to delete redundant revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the WP database needs cleaning and optimization, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting unnecessary page and post revisions and performing cleaning and optimization maintenance routines, this plugin also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Remove all transient options
• 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 optimization schedules
• Display database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after automatic database cleanup
• Marks dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize WP Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphaned post meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP-Sweep WP Plugin – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep

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

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add 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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