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 Content Revisions Using Plugins

As soon as you edit and save your posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions section below the page or post …

(Post Editor section – The WordPress revisions list)

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

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 50 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions you could be storing around 1,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 100MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

This plugin removes redundant post revisions from your database and database content belonging to each revision such as tags, meta information, relationships, and more.

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

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

(WP Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

A table of post revisions stored in your WordPress database will be returned on the screen …

(List of post revisions – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Clear posts revisions list)

The redundant revisions will be removed from the WordPress database …

(Revisions cleared – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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 saving all new revisions again …

(WordPress will automatically begin to save all new post revisions again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use the plugin to optimize the database …

(Keep your site’s database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if your WP database tables need to be optimized and runs a one-click optimization routine that does not require you to log into your server panel …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click optimization maintenance routine)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to remove unnecessary page and post revisions (with the added option to keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click table cleaning and optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you perform the following optional maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• Exclude certain tables and/or specific posts/pages 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 – WordPress Plugin

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting redundant post and page revisions and performing cleaning and optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you perform database maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• Receive email notifications on scheduled database cleanups
• Displays dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings)

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

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep)

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

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

(WP-Sweep – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep

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

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

(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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