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.

Content Revision Management Using Plugins

As soon as you edit and save posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions list at the bottom of your content editor …

(Viewing the WordPress post revisions box)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help create a more effective workflow. If you write 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 200 posts on your site and each post has 10 revisions you could be storing around 2,000 copies of old 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 free plugins for WordPress available to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your database as well as other revision-related content such as meta data, relationships, tags, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, the plugin can perform optimizations on your WordPress database without having to log into your server.

Log into the Dashboard and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of revisions)

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

(Clear posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The unnecessary revisions will be deleted from your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Revisions deleted)

As WordPress automatically saves post revisions, the process will automatically start again. After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible …

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

You can also use the plugin to optimize the database …

(Better Delete Revision – Optimize the database)

The plugin checks to see if the WP database tables need optimization and provides a one-click optimization function without requiring you to log into your server panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

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 remove unnecessary post and page revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if your WordPress database tables need optimization, it also lets you perform the following optional tasks:

• Delete trashed comments, posts, and pages
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude specific pages/posts and tables from optimization
• Automatically schedule 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 – WordPress Plugin)

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

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• See database table statistics
• Receive email notifications on automatic database cleanups
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings Screen)

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

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphan post meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP Sweep – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep 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

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 search for 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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