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 create, edit, and save posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions box below your content editor …

(The WordPress revisions list)

Having autosave and revisions is undoubtedly very useful. If you write and edit often, 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.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 10 posts published on your site and each post has 5 revisions your database could be storing around 500 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 500 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 50MB.

Fortunately, there are some really great (and free) WordPress plugins to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

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

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

In the main menu section of your WP administration area, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions associated with each post entry, the plugin calculates and displays a list of revisions stored in your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Posts revisions list)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to remove the items from the database, or select ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to cancel the process and exit the plugin …

(Remove posts revisions list)

The redundant data will be removed from the WordPress database …

(Revisions list removed)

As WordPress automatically stores post revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you have turned the feature off). After a period of time, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as lean as possible …

(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)

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

(Optimize the database – Better Delete Revision)

The plugin checks to see if your database tables need to be optimized and provides a one-click optimization maintenance routine without the need to log into your server panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your WP database needs optimization)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to prune redundant revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if the database tables need optimization, it also lets you do the following:

• Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude specific pages/posts and tables from optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize WP Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning redundant page and post revisions and performing optimization routines, this plugin also lets you perform maintenance tasks such as:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Remove all transient options
• Clear out the 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 scheduling
• Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• E-mail notifications after scheduled cleanups
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize WP Plugin – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize WP Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned term relationships
• Duplicated user meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP Sweep WordPress 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

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

(Add New Plugins – WordPress 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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