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 your pages/posts, WordPress begins to store revisions for the content in its database. These appear in a Revisions box below your page editor …

(Viewing the WordPress post revisions list)

Having access to features like autosave and automatic revisions is undoubtedly a good thing. If you write or edit often, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly bloat 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 you have 100 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 15 revisions your database could be storing up to 1,500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,500 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 150MB.

The good news is that there are some great plugins 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)

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

After installing and activating the plugin, you can perform optimizations on your database.

In your Dashboard menu, select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WordPress Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of revisions)

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

(Clear posts revisions)

The unnecessary revisions will be removed from the database …

(List of post revisions deleted)

After a while, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to save your revisions again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off) …

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

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use this plugin to keep the site’s database optimized …

(Keep your site’s database optimized – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only lets you remove unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the database tables need to be trimmed, cleaned, and optimized, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• Exclude certain tables and specific pages/posts from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

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

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to removing unnecessary post and page revisions and checking if the database tables need optimization, this plugin also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Remove stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• E-mail notifications on scheduled database cleanup
• Displays dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

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

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin)

WP-Sweep allows you to clean up duplicated, orphaned, and unused data in your WordPress database, including revisions. This plugin cleans up:

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphan user meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP-Sweep WP Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

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

(Plugins Menu – Add Plugins)

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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