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 – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you save your posts/pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions of the content in its database. These show up in a Revisions box at the bottom of your page or post …

(Post Editor screen – Viewing the post revisions list)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt features that help create a more effective workflow. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, over time the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

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

For example, if you have 100 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions your database could be storing an extra 2,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 200MB.

The good news is that there are a number of free WordPress plugins that can help you control and manage 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)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant post revisions from your database and other revision-related content such as tags, meta data, relationships, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, the plugin can perform optimizations on your database without having to log into your server.

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

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Settings)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(Posts revisions list)

Click on the button below the list to clear all items from the WP database …

(Delete posts revisions)

The unnecessary items will be removed from your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Post revisions removed)

After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to save your new post revisions again …

(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)

You can also use the plugin to optimize the database …

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

The plugin checks to see if your WordPress database tables need to be optimized and runs an easy one-click optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your hosting control panel or mess with complicated database management software …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the database tables need to be optimized)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you delete redundant revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click table cleaning and optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you perform the following optional tasks:

• Delete trashed comments, posts, and pages
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude certain tables and/or specific pages/posts from optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin)

In addition to deleting redundant revisions of posts and pages and performing table cleaning and optimization maintenance routines, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of spam comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• See database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after automatic cleanup
• Displays dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize WP Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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

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

(WP-Sweep WordPress Plugin – Settings)

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

For more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Manage Post Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(Add Plugins – 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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