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 create, edit, and save your posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions section below the post editor …

(View the revisions list – Post Editor screen)

Having autosave and automatic revisions is undoubtedly a timesaver. If you write or edit often, 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 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 15 revisions you could be storing an extra 3,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 3,000 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 300MB.

Fortunately, there are several free plugins for WordPress available to 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)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant post revisions from your database as well as other database content belonging to each revision like tags, meta data, relationships, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, the plugin can optimize your WP database without having to log into your server.

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

(WordPress Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of revisions)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button to delete all list items from the database, or abandon the task and exit the page …

(Remove list of post revisions)

The unnecessary revisions will be removed from the WP database …

(List of revisions deleted – Better Delete Revision Manager)

After some time has passed and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website and their related post revisions, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins saving all revisions again …

(WordPress will automatically begin to store your new post revisions again!)

You can also use the plugin to optimize the database …

(Optimize your WordPress database – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The plugin checks to see if your WordPress database tables need to be optimized and provides a one-click table optimization function without requiring you to log into your hosting control panel or use technical applications …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the database tables need to be optimized)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress)

The Optimize Database plugin not only can be used to remove unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click cleaning and optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you perform the following:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude selected tables and specific posts/pages from optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings Page)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to removing unnecessary revisions of posts and pages and performing database cleaning and optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Removal of stale spam comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• E-mail notifications after scheduled cleanup
• Highlights potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep)

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

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

(WP-Sweep Plugin – Settings Page)

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 “Revisions“, “Database 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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