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 revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions section below the page editor …
(Post Editor section – View the WordPress revisions box)
Having access to content workflow functions like autosave and automatic revisions is something that helps make work more efficient. If you write or edit a lot of content, however, the number of revisions can start building 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 300 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing around 6,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 6,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 600MB.
Fortunately, there are a few great plugins that can help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)
This plugin deletes redundant revisions of posts from your database as well as other revision-related content such as relationships, tags, meta information, and more.
After the plugin has been installed and activated, Better Delete Revision can optimize your database.
Go to your Dashboard and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …
(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings Menu)
This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions you can safely delete from your database …
(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)
A list of revisions stored in the WordPress database will display on the screen …
(List of revisions)
Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to delete all list items from the WP database, or cancel the task and exit the plugin with all post revisions undeleted …
(Clear list of revisions – Better Delete Revision)
The redundant revisions will be removed from the database …
(Revisions cleared)
As WordPress automatically saves your post revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you have turned the feature off). After some time has passed, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as light as possible …
(Post revisions automatically start being stored again!)
You can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep your database optimized …
(Keep the WordPress database optimized)
Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WordPress database tables need to be optimized and performs an easy one-click optimization maintenance routine that does not require you to log into your hosting control panel or mess with complicated tools …
(Better Delete Revision checks if the database tables need to be optimized)
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 remove redundant page and post revisions (with the option to keep an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if your database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:
- Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
- Delete spammed comments
- Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
- Exclude specific posts/pages and tables from cleaning and optimization
- Automatically schedule optimizations
- And more!
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings)
For more details, go here: Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin
WP-Optimize
(WP-Optimize WP Plugin)
In addition to deleting unnecessary post and page revisions and checking if the database needs cleaning and optimization, WP Optimize also lets you perform maintenance tasks such as:
- Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
- Removal of trashed comments
- Mobile device friendly
- Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
- Clean up auto draft posts
- 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-mail notifications on 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 WP Plugin)
WP-Sweep lets you clean up unused, duplicated, and orphaned data in your WP database, including post revisions. This plugin cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Deleted comments
- Orphaned term meta
- Duplicated term meta
- Transient options
- And more!
(WPSweep – 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
For more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Manage Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …
(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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