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.

Content Revision Management Using Plugins

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

(WordPress post revisions box – Post Editor screen)

Having workflow functions like autosave and revisions is no doubt something that helps make work more productive. If you write and edit extensively, however, the 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 you have 100 posts on your site and each post has an average of 15 revisions your WordPress database could be storing around 1,500 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,500 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 150MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

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

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

In your admin section, select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to delete the items from your WordPress database, or select the ‘No, …’ button to exit the tool …

(Remove list of revisions)

The redundant data will be deleted from the WP database …

(List of revisions cleared – Better Delete Revision)

As WordPress automatically stores all new revisions, the process will automatically begin again. After a while, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible …

(WordPress will automatically begin saving your new revisions again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep your WP database optimized …

(Keep the WordPress database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your WP database needs optimization and lets you perform a one-click table optimization maintenance routine that does not require you to log into your hosting control panel or use complicated database management applications …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

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

• Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude specific posts/pages and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Page)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting unnecessary post and page revisions and checking if the database tables need optimization, this plugin also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• 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
• Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications on automatic database cleanup
• Marks dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize WP Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep 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 term relationships
• Duplicated term meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP Sweep – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep 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 WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Post Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Plugins Menu – Add 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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