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 Post Revisions Using Plugins

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

(WordPress revisions list – Post Editor screen)

For most WordPress users, having autosave and revisions is no doubt very useful. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 200 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each you could be storing around 3,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 3,000 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 300MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WP Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and other revision-related content like relationships, meta information, tags, and more.

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

In the WordPress Dashboard menu, choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions associated with each post entry, the plugin display a list of revisions stored in your database …

(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(Delete posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision)

The unnecessary post revisions will be deleted from the database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Post revisions deleted)

After a while, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins to store all new revisions again …

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

Like the other plugins described further below, you can also use this plugin to optimize the database …

(Optimize the site’s database)

The plugin checks to see if your WP database needs optimization and provides a one-click optimization routine without the need to log into your server panel or mess with technical database management applications …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the WP database tables need optimization)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only can be used to remove unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (with the added option of keeping an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the WordPress database needs to be optimized, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Page)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning unnecessary page and post revisions and checking if the WP database needs optimization, this plugin also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Removal of trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Remove all transient options
• Clear out the post trash
• 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
• View database table statistics
• Receive email notifications after scheduled cleanup
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphaned term meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP-Sweep Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

(Add Plugin – WordPress 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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