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 save a page/post, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions list at the bottom of the page or post …

(Post Editor section – The WordPress post revisions box)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more efficient. If you write or edit a lot of content, however, the 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 50 posts on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions your database could be storing around 1,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 100MB.

The good news is that there are some great WordPress plugins available to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and other revision-related content like relationships, meta data, tags, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can use the plugin to perform optimizations on your WP database without having to log into your server.

Log into your WordPress admin section, then go to the admin navigation menu and choose choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions belonging to each post entry, the plugin display a table of post revisions stored in the WP database …

(List of post revisions)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Clear posts revisions)

The unnecessary revisions will be cleared from the WordPress database …

(Revisions removed)

As WordPress automatically stores all post revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you specifically turn the feature off). After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site and their related post revisions, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible …

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

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

(Optimize the database)

The plugin checks to see if the database tables need to be optimized and provides an easy one-click database table optimization maintenance routine without the need to log into your server control panel or mess with complicated database management tools …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only lets you delete unnecessary page and post revisions (with the option of keeping a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if the WordPress database tables need optimization, it also lets you do maintenance tasks such as:

• Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude selected tables 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 cleaning redundant post and page revisions and checking if your WP database tables need optimization, WP Optimize also lets you perform maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• Display database table statistics
• Receive email notifications on automatic cleanups
• Marks dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

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 comment meta
• Duplicated user meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WPSweep – WordPress 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 WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for 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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