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 Content Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you edit and update pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions section at the bottom of your page or post …

(Post Editor section – The WordPress post revisions list)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt features that help create a more effective workflow. If you write or edit a lot of content, 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 also be able to manage your revisions.

(Your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 300 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing around 6,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 6,000 revisions, the total space wasted is about 600MB.

The good news is that there are a few great plugins for WordPress that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your database and database content related to each revision like relationships, tags, meta data, and more.

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

In the WP administration section, choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(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 safely deleted from your WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions belonging to each post, the plugin return a list of revisions stored in the WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision – List of revisions)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button to delete all list items from the database, or select ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to exit the plugin …

(Clear posts revisions)

The redundant revisions will be cleared from your WordPress database …

(Revisions deleted)

After a while, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins saving all revisions again …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize the WP database …

(Keep the site’s database optimized – Better Delete Revision)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database needs to be optimized and performs a one-click optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your server panel or mess with technical applications …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you delete redundant post and page revisions (with the added option of keeping an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the database tables need to be optimized, it also lets you do maintenance tasks like:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude selected tables and specific posts/pages from 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 Plugin For WordPress

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

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

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of spam comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications on automatic database cleanup
• Highlights potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize WP Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WP Sweep 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 “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Add Plugins – 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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