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 Using Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and save a post/page, WordPress begins to store revisions for the content in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions box at the bottom of the page or post …

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

For most WordPress users, having features like autosave and revisions is no doubt something that helps make work more productive. If you write extensively, however, after a while the number of 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 you have 100 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each you could be storing an extra 1,500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,500 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 150MB.

The good news is that there are a number of WordPress plugins available that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WP Plugin)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and other database content related to each revision such as meta data, relationships, tags, and more.

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

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

(WP Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of post revisions – Better Delete Revision)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to clear all list items from the WordPress database, or abandon the operation and exit the plugin …

(Remove list of revisions)

The unnecessary post information will be cleared from the database …

(Post revisions deleted)

As WordPress automatically stores all new revisions, the process will automatically begin again. After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins storing your new post revisions again!)

You can also use this plugin to optimize your site’s database …

(Optimize your WordPress database)

The plugin checks to see if your database needs optimization and provides an easy one-click optimization function without the need to log into your server panel or mess with technical software …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click WP database optimization routine)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you delete unnecessary post and page revisions (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the WordPress database needs optimization, it also lets you perform the following:

• Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude selected tables and specific posts/pages from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

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

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Removal of unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• See database table statistics
• E-mail notifications on scheduled cleanup
• Marks dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin – Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep WP Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphan term meta
• Duplicated post meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep

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 Database“, etc …

(Add Plugin – 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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