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 Revisions – WordPress Plugins
As soon as you create, edit, and save a page/post, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions section below your post or page …
(Post Editor section – The WordPress revisions list)
Having autosave and revisions is no doubt a good thing. If you write or edit extensively, however, after a while the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase 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 you have 200 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each you could be storing up to 3,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 3,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 300MB.
The good news is that there are a number of plugins for WordPress to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are some of these:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)
Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database as well as database content associated with each revision like relationships, meta information, tags, and more.
After installing and activating the plugin, you can perform optimizations on your database without having to log into your server.
In your main menu of your administration area, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …
(Settings – 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 removed from your database …
(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)
A table of post revisions stored in the database will display on the screen …
(Better Delete Revision – Posts revisions)
Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to delete all list items from the WP database …
(Delete posts revisions)
The unnecessary items will be removed from your WordPress database …
(Post revisions list deleted)
As WordPress automatically stores your revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you specifically turn the feature off). After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as lean as possible …
(WordPress will automatically begin to save all new post revisions again!)
You can also use the plugin to optimize your database …
(Keep your WP database optimized – Better Delete Revision Manager)
The plugin checks to see if your database needs to be optimized and provides a one-click optimization function that does not require you to log into your server control panel …
(Better Delete Revision checks if your WP database tables need optimization)
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 prune unnecessary page and post revisions (with the added option of keeping an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click optimization routine, it also lets you perform maintenance tasks such as:
- Delete trashed comments, posts, and pages
- Delete spammed comments
- Delete ‘expired transients’
- Exclude selected pages/posts and tables from cleaning and optimization
- Automatically schedule optimizations
- And more!
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings)
For more details, go here: Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress
WP Optimize
(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress)
In addition to cleaning unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and checking if the WordPress database tables need to be optimized, this plugin also lets you perform maintenance tasks like:
- Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
- Removal of trashed comments
- Mobile device friendly
- Remove transient options
- Clear out post trash
- 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 schedules of optimization
- Display database table statistics
- E-mail notifications on automatic cleanups
- Displays potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
- And more!
(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings)
For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin
WP Sweep
(WP Sweep)
In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary revisions, WP-Sweep also cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Deleted comments
- Orphan user meta
- Duplicated user meta
- Unused terms
- And more!
(WP Sweep WordPress Plugin – Settings Panel)
For more details, go here: WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress
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 WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Post Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …
(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add Plugin)
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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