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 update posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions list at the bottom of the post or page …

(Post Editor screen – The Revisions box)
Having access to effective workflow features like autosave and automatic revisions is undoubtedly a timesaver. If you write and edit often, however, over time 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.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)
For example, if there are 100 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions you could be storing an extra 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 200MB.
Fortunately, there are a few great WordPress plugins available to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision Plugin)
Better Delete Revision deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and other revision-related content like meta data, tags, relationships, and more.
After installing and activating the plugin, you can perform optimizations on your WordPress database.
In your Dashboard, select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings)
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 remove from the database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)
A table of revisions stored in the database will be returned on the screen …

(List of post revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)
Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ below the list to remove all items from the WP database …

(Clear list of post revisions)
The redundant post information will be deleted from your database …

(Revisions list deleted)
![]()
As WordPress automatically stores your post revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you specifically turn the feature off). After a while and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website and their related post revisions, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible …

(Revisions automatically start again!)
Like the other plugins listed in this section, you can also use the plugin to keep your WordPress database optimized …

(Optimize your site’s database)
The plugin checks to see if your database tables need optimization and lets you perform a one-click table optimization routine without requiring you to log into your hosting panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the database needs to be optimized)
For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)
OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to delete redundant revisions of posts and pages (with the option to keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click optimization routine, it also lets you perform optional maintenance tasks such as:
- Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
- Delete unused tags
- Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
- Exclude specific posts/pages and tables from optimization
- Automatically schedule optimizations
- And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings)
For more details, go here: Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin
WP Optimize
(WP-Optimize WordPress Plugin)
In addition to performing tasks such as removing unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and checking if your database tables need optimization, this plugin also lets you perform the following:
- Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
- Remove akismet metadata from comments
- Mobile device friendly
- Remove all transient options
- Clean up auto draft posts
- Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
- Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
- Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
- See database table statistics
- E-mail notifications on scheduled cleanups
- Highlights potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
- And more!

(WP-Optimize – Settings Panel)
For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin
WP-Sweep
(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress)
In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary post revisions, this plugin also cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Deleted comments
- Orphaned post meta
- Duplicated comment meta
- Transient options
- And more!

(WP-Sweep – 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
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 type in keywords like “Manage Post Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add Plugin)
We hope that you have found the above information on plugins that will help you manage your WordPress post revisions useful.

***
"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
***



