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 a post/page, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions section below your content editor …

(Post Editor section – The WordPress post revisions list)

Having effective workflow features like autosave and revisions is undoubtedly something that can help make work more productive. If you write or edit a lot of content, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

(Your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 200 posts published on your site and each post has 20 revisions you could be storing up to 4,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 4,000 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 400MB.

The good news is that there are various free plugins for WordPress to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and other revision-related content such as meta data, relationships, tags, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can perform optimizations on your WP database without having to log into your server.

In your WordPress administration section, select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

A table of post revisions stored in the database will be returned on the screen …

(Posts revisions list)

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

(Clear posts revisions list)

The unnecessary post revisions will be deleted from your database …

(Revisions deleted)

After a while, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to save your post revisions again …

(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep your database optimized …

(Better Delete Revision – Keep the WordPress database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if the WordPress database needs to be optimized and lets you run an easy one-click WordPress database optimization routine without requiring you to log into your hosting control panel or use complicated tools …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click WordPress database optimization routine)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you remove redundant revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click optimization routine, it also lets you do the following:

• Delete trashed comments, pages, and posts
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude certain pages/posts and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

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

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin)

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

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove 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 optimization schedules
• Display database table statistics
• E-mail notifications on scheduled database cleanups
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned comment meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WPSweep WordPress Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep 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 WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(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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