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 edit and update your pages/posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions for the content in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions section below your post or page …

(Post Editor section – The WordPress revisions box)

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

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

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

Fortunately, there are various free WordPress plugins that can help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WP Plugin)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant revisions of posts from your database as well as other revision-related content such as relationships, meta data, tags, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can perform optimizations on your database.

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

(WP Settings – Better Delete Revision)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager screen. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate how many redundant post revisions you can safely remove from the WP database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

A list of revisions stored in the WordPress database will be returned on the screen …

(Posts revisions)

Click on the button below the list to remove all items from the database …

(Remove list of revisions)

The unnecessary revisions will be removed from the database …

(Post revisions deleted)

As WordPress automatically saves all revisions, the process will automatically start again. After a period of time and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins storing your new revisions again!)

Like the other plugins described in this section, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep your database optimized …

(Optimize your WordPress database – Better Delete Revision)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database tables need optimization and provides an easy one-click table optimization feature without the need to log into your hosting control panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the database needs to be optimized)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you remove unnecessary page and post revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if your WordPress database needs to be cleaned and optimized, it also lets you perform database maintenance tasks such as:

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

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

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize WordPress Plugin)

In addition to cleaning redundant post and page revisions and checking if the WordPress database tables need cleaning and optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

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

(WP-Optimize – Settings Screen)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphaned post meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP Sweep WP Plugin – Settings)

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

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 “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.

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