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 update your pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions box below your page or post …

(Post Editor section – The WordPress revisions list)

For most WordPress users, having functions like autosave and automatic revisions is undoubtedly a good thing. If you write or edit 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 manage your revisions.

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

For example, if you have 100 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each you could be storing around 1,500 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,500 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 150MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

This plugin removes redundant revisions of posts from your database and other database content belonging to each revision like tags, relationships, meta data, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use the plugin to optimize your database without having to log into your server.

Go to the Dashboard and select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WP Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions belonging to each post entry, the plugin calculates and displays a table of post revisions stored in the WordPress database …

(List of post revisions – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Remove posts revisions)

The redundant items will be removed from your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Revisions list cleared)

After a while, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins saving all new revisions again …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

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

(Keep the WordPress database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if your WP database tables need to be optimized and provides an easy one-click WordPress database optimization routine without requiring you to log into your server panel or mess with technical software …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you prune unnecessary post and page revisions (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click WP database table cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following optional maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• Exclude certain tables or specific posts/pages 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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting unnecessary page and post revisions and performing optimization maintenance routines, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Remove stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out the 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 optimization schedules
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications on scheduled cleanups
• Highlights dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings Panel)

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

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WP Sweep WP Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress

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 “Manage 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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