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 Post Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you edit and save your posts/pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions box below your post editor …

(The WordPress revisions list)

For most users, having functions like autosave and revisions is undoubtedly a great thing. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, after a while the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 200 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each you could be storing around 3,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 3,000 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 300MB.

Fortunately, there are some really great free plugins for WordPress to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Let’s take a look at a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

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

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use it to optimize your database.

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

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Settings)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(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 exit the plugin with your post revisions undeleted …

(Remove posts revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The redundant post revisions will be removed from your WordPress database …

(Revisions deleted)

After a period of time, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to save all new post revisions again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off) …

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

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize the site’s database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Keep your database optimized)

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

(Better Delete Revision checks if the database needs to be optimized)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you prune redundant revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you do the following:

• Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude selected pages/posts and tables from optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

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

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize WP Plugin)

In addition to cleaning unnecessary post and page revisions and performing database optimization routines, WP Optimize also lets you perform maintenance tasks such as:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Removal of stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all transient options
• 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 schedules of optimization
• Display database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after automatic cleanup
• Highlights potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary post revisions, this plugin also cleans up:

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphan comment meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

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

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 “Manage Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Add New – 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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