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.

Post/Page Revision Management Using Plugins

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

(Post Editor section – The Post revisions list)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt features that help create a more productive workflow. If you write extensively, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

(Your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 50 posts on your site and each post has 20 revisions your WordPress database could be storing around 1,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 100MB.

The good news is that there are some great free WordPress plugins available to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WordPress Plugin)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts 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.

Log into your WordPress dashboard, then go to the admin navigation menu and choose click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of revisions – Better Delete Revision)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ below the list to clear all items from the database, or select the ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ button to abandon the task and exit the tool with your post revisions undeleted …

(Clear list of post revisions)

The unnecessary data will be removed from the database …

(Post revisions list removed)

As WordPress automatically stores all revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you specifically turn the feature off). After a period of time and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site and their associated post revisions, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible …

(WordPress will automatically begin saving all new post revisions again!)

Like the other plugins described further below, you can also use the plugin to optimize the site’s database …

(Keep the WordPress database optimized – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The plugin checks to see if your WP database tables need to be optimized and provides a one-click table optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your hosting control panel …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click database optimization routine)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

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 unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (with the option of keeping an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click table optimization routine, it also lets you do the following:

• Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude certain tables or even specific pages/posts from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Panel)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to cleaning unnecessary page and post revisions and checking if your WordPress database needs to be cleaned and optimized, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications on scheduled cleanups
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep WordPress Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned user meta
• Duplicated post meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP-Sweep Plugin – Settings Panel)

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 type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New Plugin)

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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