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 Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you update your posts/pages, WordPress begins to store revisions for the content in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions list below your post or page …

(View the WordPress revisions box – Post Editor screen)

Having autosave and revisions is undoubtedly something that contributes to making work more efficient. If you write often, however, the number of revisions can start building 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 200 posts on your site and each post has an average of 10 revisions you could be storing around 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 200MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and other revision-related content like tags, meta data, relationships, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, the plugin can optimize your WP database.

In your Dashboard, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions you can safely delete from your 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! …’ below the list to remove all items from the database, or select ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to cancel the process and exit the plugin screen with all post revisions undeleted …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Delete posts revisions)

The redundant post information will be deleted from the database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Post revisions list deleted)

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

(WordPress automatically begins to save all post revisions again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep your site’s database optimized …

(Optimize the database)

The plugin checks to see if your WordPress database tables need to be optimized and runs a one-click WP database table optimization routine without requiring you to log into your server panel or mess with complicated database management applications …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the WordPress database tables need optimization)

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 delete redundant post and page revisions (with the option of keeping an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click table optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you do the following:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin)

In addition to deleting redundant post and page revisions and checking if your WordPress database tables need to be optimized, this plugin also lets you perform the following:

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

(WP Optimize – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphan term meta
• Duplicated user meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WPSweep 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 database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Post Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Add New 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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