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 Using Plugins

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

(Post Editor screen – Viewing the WordPress post revisions box)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help make work more productive. If you write extensively, however, the revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 100 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing an extra 1,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 100MB.

Fortunately, there are various free plugins for WordPress that can help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

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

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use it to perform optimizations on your WordPress database without having to log into your server.

Log into your WordPress site, then go to the admin navigation menu and select click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WordPress Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

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

(List of revisions)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button to remove all list items from your database, or select the ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ button to abandon the process and exit the plugin settings screen …

(Clear list of revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The redundant data will be removed from your WordPress database …

(Revisions list cleared)

After a while, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins to store your new revisions again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off) …

(WordPress automatically begins storing your new revisions again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize the site’s database …

(Optimize the database – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WordPress database needs to be optimized and provides a one-click optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your hosting panel or mess with technical database management software …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click WP database table optimization routine)

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 prune unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (with the added option of keeping a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if the database needs optimization, it also lets you do the following optional tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Screen)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize WordPress Plugin)

In addition to cleaning unnecessary page and post revisions and checking if your WordPress database tables need cleaning and optimization, this plugin also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Removal of stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Remove all transient options
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• See database table statistics
• Receive email notifications on scheduled database cleanups
• Highlights dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary revisions, WP Sweep also cleans up:

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

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin Settings Page)

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 database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(WordPress 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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