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 Content Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you update posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions list at the bottom of your page or post …

(WordPress revisions list)

Having access to workflow features like autosave and automatic revisions is undoubtedly a great thing. If you write a lot of content, however, the revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(As you write more posts on your site, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if there are 200 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing up to 2,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 200MB.

The good news is that there are various plugins to 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 For WordPress)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and database content belonging to each revision like meta data, tags, relationships, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use the plugin to optimize your database without having to log into your server.

Log into your WordPress site, then go to the main navigation menu and choose select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – 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 your database …

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of revisions)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Clear posts revisions)

The redundant post revisions will be deleted from the WP database …

(Post revisions list deleted)

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

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use this plugin to keep the site’s database optimized …

(Optimize your WordPress database)

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

(Better Delete Revision checks if the database needs optimization)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you remove unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click cleaning and optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

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

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

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize WP Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as removing redundant revisions of posts and pages and checking if your WP database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, WP Optimize also lets you do database maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of stale spam comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Remove transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• Display database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after automatic database cleanup
• Marks dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WPSweep Plugin – 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

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“, “Optimize Database“, 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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