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 save posts and pages, WordPress begins to store revisions for your content in its database. These appear in a Revisions box at the bottom of your page or post …

(Post Editor section – The WordPress revisions list)

Having autosave and revisions is undoubtedly very useful. If you write extensively, however, over time the revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

(As you write more posts, your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 200 posts published on your site and each post has 15 revisions your WordPress database could be storing up to 3,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 3,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 300MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

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

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

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

(Settings Menu – 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 can be safely removed from your WordPress database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions associated with each post, the plugin will then calculate and display a list of post revisions stored in the WP database …

(Posts revisions)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to clear the items from your WP database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Delete posts revisions)

The unnecessary post revisions will be cleared from the database …

(Revisions cleared)

As WordPress automatically stores post revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you have turned the feature off). After a period of time and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as lean as possible …

(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)

Like the other plugins listed in this section, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep your database optimized …

(Optimize your database – Better Delete Revision)

The plugin checks to see if the WP database needs to be optimized and lets you perform an easy one-click database table optimization routine that does not require you to log into your hosting panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the database tables need optimization)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision WordPress 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 prune unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click table optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude certain tables and/or specific posts/pages from optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize WordPress Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as removing redundant page and post revisions and checking if the database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Removal of all transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• See database table statistics
• E-mail notifications on automatic database cleanups
• Highlights potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize WordPress Plugin – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep)

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

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

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep

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

For more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Post Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New Plugins)

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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