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 Content Revisions Using Plugins

As soon as you save pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions box at the bottom of your content editor …

(Post Editor screen – Viewing the post revisions box)

For most users, having functions like autosave and automatic revisions is undoubtedly a good thing. If you write 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.

(As post revisions accumulate, 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 WordPress database could be storing an extra 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 200MB.

The good news is that there are several free plugins for WordPress that can help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Let’s take a look at a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WP Plugin)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and database content related to each revision such as meta data, tags, relationships, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can use the Better Delete Revision Manager to optimize your database.

Go to the Dashboard and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager screen. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be safely deleted from your WP database …

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions belonging to each post, the plugin returns a list of revisions stored in the database …

(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 …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Delete list of post revisions)

The redundant post information will be deleted from the WP database …

(Post revisions list cleared – Better Delete Revision Manager)

As WordPress automatically stores all post revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you have turned the feature off). After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible …

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

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the WordPress database optimized …

(Optimize your WordPress database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your WP database tables need optimization and runs an easy one-click table optimization maintenance routine without the need to log into your hosting panel or mess with complicated tools …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the WP database needs 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 pages and posts (with the option of keeping an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click WP database table cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• Exclude certain tables and specific posts/pages from optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin – Settings Panel)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize WordPress Plugin)

In addition to cleaning unnecessary revisions of posts and pages and performing optimization maintenance routines, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• View database table statistics
• Receive email notifications after scheduled database cleanups
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep WP Plugin)

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

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

(WPSweep WP Plugin – Settings)

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 search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, 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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