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.

Page/Post Revision Management Using Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and update pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions list at the bottom of your post or page …

(Revisions list – Post Editor screen)

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

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 250 posts on your site and each post has an average of 10 revisions your WordPress database could be storing around 2,500 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,500 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 250MB.

Fortunately, there are several plugins to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

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

After installing and activating the plugin, Better Delete Revision can optimize your WP database.

In the Dashboard, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions belonging to each post, the plugin calculates and displays a list of revisions stored in your WordPress database …

(Posts revisions)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button to delete all list items from the database, or exit the plugin …

(Delete list of revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The redundant revisions will be cleared from the WP database …

(List of post revisions removed)

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

(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your WordPress database …

(Keep the database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database tables need to be optimized and provides an easy one-click WP database optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your hosting control panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your WP 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 Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you prune unnecessary post and page revisions (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click table cleaning and optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress – Settings Page)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to removing unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and checking if your database tables need optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all transient options
• Clear out the 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
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• Receive email notifications after scheduled cleanups
• Highlights dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WP-Sweep Plugin – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep WP 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“, “Database Optimize“, 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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