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.

Page & Post Revision Management Using Plugins

As soon as you update posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions section at the bottom of the post or page …

(View the WordPress revisions list)

Having autosave and revisions is a good thing. If you write or edit often, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat 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 there are 10 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 5 revisions you could be storing an extra 500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 500 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 50MB.

The good news is that there are several free 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)

This plugin removes redundant revisions of posts from your database and other revision-related content like meta information, relationships, tags, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, the plugin can perform optimizations on your WordPress database.

Log into your WordPress admin section, then go to the main navigation menu and choose choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WP Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to delete all list items from the WordPress database, or abandon the task and exit the page with all post revisions undeleted …

(Delete posts revisions list)

The unnecessary revisions will be removed from the WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision – Revisions list deleted)

As WordPress automatically saves post revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off). After a period of time and depending on the amount of content you have published on your site and their associated post revisions, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible …

(Revisions automatically start again!)

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

(Optimize your database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your WordPress database needs optimization and provides an easy one-click optimization routine that does not require you to log into your server control panel or use technical database management applications …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your database tables need to be optimized)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you remove unnecessary post and page revisions (with the option of keeping an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click optimization routine, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin – Settings Page)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning unnecessary revisions of posts and pages and checking if the WP database needs to be cleaned and optimized, WP Optimize also lets you do maintenance tasks such as:

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

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep WP Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphaned term meta
• 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 WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Manage Post Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, 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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