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 new post revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions section below the page editor …

(WordPress post revisions list – Post Editor section)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help create a more productive workflow. If you write often, however, the revisions can start to build 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 on your site, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if there are 50 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing an extra 1,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions, the total space wasted is about 100MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin removes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database as well as database content associated with each revision like relationships, meta data, tags, and more.

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

Log into your admin area and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

A table of revisions stored in your database will display on the screen …

(List of post revisions – Better Delete Revision)

Click on the button below the list to remove all items from your database, or exit the tool …

(Better Delete Revision – Delete list of post revisions)

The unnecessary data will be removed from your database …

(Revisions deleted)

As WordPress automatically saves all post revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off). After a while, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins storing all new post revisions again!)

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

(Keep your database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if your WordPress database tables need to be optimized and provides an easy one-click table optimization function without requiring you to log into your server panel or mess with technical database management software …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your WordPress database tables need to be optimized)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you delete redundant revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click WordPress database optimization routine, it also lets you do optional maintenance tasks like:

• Delete trashed comments, posts, and pages
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude certain posts/pages and tables from cleaning and 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)

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

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove trashed 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 can be optimized
• E-mail notifications on automatic database cleanups
• Highlights dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings Page)

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

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphan post meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WPSweep – 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

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 “Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(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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