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 Content Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and save a post/page, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions box at the bottom of the post or page …

(The revisions list)

Having autosave and revisions is undoubtedly very useful. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, after a while the number of 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 200 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions your database could be storing up to 4,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 4,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 400MB.

Fortunately, there are a number of plugins for WordPress to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your database and other revision-related content such as tags, relationships, meta information, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, Better Delete Revision can perform optimizations on your WordPress database.

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

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager screen. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions you can delete from the database …

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(Posts revisions list)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to clear all list items from your database, or select the ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ button to abandon the task and exit the Better Delete Revision screen with all post revisions undeleted …

(Delete list of post revisions)

The unnecessary data will be cleared from your WP database …

(Post revisions list deleted)

After some time has passed and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins storing post revisions again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off) …

(WordPress will automatically begin storing your revisions again!)

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

(Optimize your database – Better Delete Revision)

The plugin checks to see if the database needs to be optimized and provides an easy one-click table optimization function without requiring you to log into your server control panel or use complicated database management applications …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your database needs optimization)

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

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 delete unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if the WordPress database tables need to be trimmed, cleaned, and optimized, it also lets you do the following:

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

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

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to cleaning redundant page and post revisions and performing optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you perform maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• Display database table statistics
• Receive email notifications after automatic cleanups
• Highlights potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphaned user meta
• Duplicated post meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin Settings Panel)

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

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 “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, 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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