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 a page/post, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions list below your post editor …

(Post Editor section – The WordPress post revisions box)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more efficient. If you write or edit often, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow 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 10 revisions your database could be storing up to 1,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 100MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

This plugin removes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database as well as other revision-related content such as relationships, tags, meta information, and more.

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

Log into your Dashboard and select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

A table of post revisions stored in the WordPress database will display on the screen …

(Better Delete Revision – Posts revisions)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button to remove all list items from the WP database …

(Clear posts revisions list)

The redundant revisions will be removed from the WP database …

(Post revisions list removed – Better Delete Revision Manager)

As WordPress automatically stores your revisions, the process will automatically start again. After some time has passed, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible …

(WordPress will automatically begin storing your new revisions again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize the database …

(Keep your site’s database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database tables need to be optimized and provides an easy one-click table optimization routine that does not require you to log into your hosting panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision 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 remove redundant revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if your database tables need optimization, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin Settings)

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

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 needs cleaning and optimization, this plugin also lets you perform maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Remove transient options
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• Display database table statistics
• Receive email notifications after automatic database cleanup
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings Screen)

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 revisions, this plugin also cleans up:

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

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress

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

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

(Add Plugin – 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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