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 update posts and pages, WordPress begins to store revisions for the content in its database. These show up in a Revisions box below the page or post …

(Post Editor screen – View the WordPress post revisions box)

For most WordPress users, having functions like autosave and revisions is no doubt a good thing. If you write or edit a lot of content, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

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

For example, if you have 50 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing up to 1,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 100MB.

Fortunately, there are a number of free plugins that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database as well as other database content associated with each revision such as tags, relationships, meta information, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can perform optimizations on your database.

In the Dashboard, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress 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 can be safely removed from your WP database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ below the list to clear all items from the database, or choose ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to exit the plugin with all post revisions undeleted …

(Clear list of revisions)

The unnecessary post information will be removed from your WP database …

(List of revisions deleted)

After a period of time, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins to save your new post revisions again …

(Post revisions automatically start being stored again!)

You can also use the plugin to keep your database optimized …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Optimize your database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database tables need to be optimized and lets you run a one-click table optimization routine without requiring you to log into your hosting control panel or use complicated database management tools …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the database needs optimization)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision WP 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 unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if the WP database tables need to be trimmed, cleaned, and optimized, it also lets you do optional maintenance tasks like:

• Delete trashed comments, posts, and pages
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• Exclude specific pages/posts and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin Settings Panel)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize WordPress Plugin)

In addition to removing unnecessary page and post revisions and checking if the database needs optimization, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Removal of stale spam comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all transient options
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• See database table statistics
• Receive email notifications on automatic database cleanup
• Displays dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings Page)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep WP Plugin)

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

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

(WP-Sweep – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep – WordPress 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

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

(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.

***

***