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 Plugins

As soon as you edit and save a page/post, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions box below your content editor …

(Post revisions list – Post Editor section)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt features that help make work more productive. If you write extensively, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase 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 200 posts on your site and each post has 20 revisions your WordPress database could be storing up to 4,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 4,000 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 400MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

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

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use it to optimize your WP database.

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

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager screen. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate how many redundant post revisions can be deleted from the WP database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions belonging to each post, the plugin will then calculate and display a list of revisions stored in your database …

(List of post revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to remove the items from your database, or choose ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to cancel the process and exit the page …

(Remove list of revisions)

The unnecessary revisions will be deleted from the WP database …

(List of post revisions deleted)

After a period of time and depending on the amount of content you have published on your site, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins storing all post revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …

(Revisions automatically start being saved again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the WordPress database optimized …

(Optimize the database)

The plugin checks to see if your database needs to be optimized and provides a one-click WP database table optimization feature without requiring you to log into your server panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the WP database needs to be optimized)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you remove redundant revisions of pages and posts (with the option of keeping a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click optimization routine, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• Exclude selected tables and/or specific pages/posts from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to removing redundant revisions of posts and pages and checking if the database needs optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• 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 automatic cleanup
• Marks dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep WP Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphan term meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress – 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

To view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Manage 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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