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 edit and update pages and posts, WordPress begins to store revisions for the content in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions box at the bottom of the post or page …

(Revisions list – Post Editor section)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help make work more productive. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat 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 100 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions you could be storing an extra 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 200MB.

Fortunately, there are several free plugins 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 WP Plugin)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and database content belonging to each revision like relationships, tags, meta information, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, Better Delete Revision can perform optimizations on your WordPress database.

Log into your WordPress site, then go to your navigation menu and select click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate how many redundant post revisions can be safely deleted from the WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of post revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to clear all list items from the WordPress database …

(Remove posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision)

The unnecessary data will be deleted from your database …

(Revisions cleared)

After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin storing all new revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …

(WordPress will automatically begin saving all post revisions again!)

Like the other plugins described in this section, you can also use the plugin to optimize your site’s database …

(Keep your database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if the WordPress database needs optimization and lets you perform a one-click optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your hosting control panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to delete redundant revisions of posts and pages (with the added option of keeping a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if your WP database tables need to be optimized, it also lets you do optional maintenance tasks such as:

• Delete trashed comments, posts, and pages
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude selected tables or specific posts/pages from optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

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

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize)

In addition to performing tasks such as removing redundant revisions of posts and pages and checking if the database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• Receive email notifications after automatic cleanup
• Displays dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep 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
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned user meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Unused terms
• 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

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

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New)

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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