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 your posts/pages, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions list below the content editor …

(Post revisions list – Post Editor section)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help create a more effective workflow. If you write or edit extensively, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(As post revisions accumulate, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 50 posts on your site and each post has 20 revisions you could be storing up to 1,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,000 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 100MB.

The good news is that there are various WordPress plugins available that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WordPress Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your database and other database content related to each revision like relationships, meta information, tags, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use the plugin to perform optimizations on your WP database.

Log into your administration area and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings – Better Delete Revision)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate how many redundant post revisions you can safely remove from your database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions associated with each post, the plugin return a table of post revisions stored in the WP database …

(List of revisions)

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

(Clear posts revisions)

The unnecessary items will be removed from the database …

(Revisions list removed)

After some time has passed and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site and their related post revisions, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WordPress database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to save all revisions again …

(WordPress will automatically begin to save all revisions again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize the WP database …

(Better Delete Revision – Keep the WP database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database tables need optimization and provides an easy one-click table optimization routine without requiring you to log into your hosting panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

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 prune redundant revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the WordPress database needs optimization, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• 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 WP Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting redundant page and post revisions and performing database table optimization routines, WP Optimize also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

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

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings)

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

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphan post meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP-Sweep Plugin – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep

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 Database“, 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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