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 update pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions list below your post or page …

(WordPress post revisions list – Post Editor screen)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help create a more productive workflow. If you write or edit a lot of content, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

(As post revisions accumulate, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 100 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 10 revisions your WordPress database could be storing an extra 1,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 100MB.

Fortunately, there are some great plugins for WordPress that can help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database as well as database content related to each revision such as tags, meta data, relationships, and more.

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

In your Dashboard menu area, choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WP Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions associated with each post entry, the plugin return a list of post revisions stored in the database …

(Posts revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ below the list to clear the items from the WP database, or select ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to abandon the task and exit the Better Delete Revision Manager screen with your post revisions undeleted …

(Remove list of revisions – Better Delete Revision)

The redundant post revisions will be deleted from your WP database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Revisions list deleted)

As WordPress automatically saves your new post revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off). After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as lean as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins saving your new post revisions again!)

Like the other plugins described further below, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize the site’s database …

(Keep the WordPress database optimized – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The plugin checks to see if your database tables need to be optimized and lets you run an easy one-click database optimization routine without the need to log into your hosting panel …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click WordPress database optimization routine)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only lets you delete redundant page and post revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click table optimization routine, it also lets you do maintenance tasks such as:

• Delete trashed comments, pages, and posts
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude selected tables or even specific pages/posts from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to cleaning redundant post and page revisions and performing database cleaning and optimization maintenance, this plugin also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove stale spam comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• View database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after scheduled cleanup
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

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

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned user meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WPSweep WordPress Plugin – Settings Panel)

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

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

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New 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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