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 Post Revisions – WordPress Plugins

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

(WordPress revisions list)

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

(As you write more posts, your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if there are 200 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 10 revisions you could be storing around 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 200MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

This plugin deletes redundant revisions of posts from your database and database content belonging to each revision like meta data, tags, relationships, and more.

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

Log into your WP Dashboard and select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(Better Delete Revision – List of revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to clear all list items from the database, or choose ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to cancel the process and exit the plugin …

(Clear list of revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The redundant data will be deleted from the database …

(Revisions list removed)

As WordPress automatically saves your new revisions, the process will automatically begin again. After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WordPress database as light as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

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

(Optimize the site’s database)

The plugin checks to see if your WP database tables need optimization and lets you perform a one-click optimization maintenance routine without the need to log into your server control panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the 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)

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

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to deleting redundant post and page revisions and checking if your WordPress database needs cleaning and optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do database maintenance tasks such as:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove spam comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• View database table statistics
• Receive email notifications on automatic cleanups
• Marks dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize WP Plugin – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep WP Plugin)

WP-Sweep lets you clean up unused, orphaned, and duplicated data in the database, including revisions. This plugin cleans up:

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

(WPSweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings Panel)

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

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 search for 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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