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 update your pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions list at the bottom of your content editor …

(Post Editor screen – The WordPress revisions box)

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

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

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

Fortunately, there are some really great (and free) WordPress plugins available that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Let’s take a look at a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

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

After installing and activating the plugin, you can use it to optimize your WordPress database without having to log into your server.

Log into your Dashboard and choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Settings Menu)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be deleted from your WP database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(List of post revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(Clear list of revisions)

The unnecessary data will be removed from the database …

(List of post revisions removed)

After a while, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to save your new post revisions again …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

Like the other plugins described in this section, you can also use this plugin to keep the WordPress database optimized …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Keep the site’s database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database needs optimization and provides an easy one-click database table optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your server panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

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 prune redundant page and post revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if your WP database needs to be cleaned and optimized, it also lets you perform the following:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

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

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out the 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
• See database table statistics
• E-mail notifications on automatic cleanups
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize WP Plugin – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep WordPress Plugin)

In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary post revisions, WP Sweep also cleans up:

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

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress – 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

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

(Add New Plugin – 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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