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.

Post Revision Management Using Plugins

As soon as you edit and update a page or post, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions list at the bottom of the post or page …

(Post Editor screen – Viewing the WordPress revisions list)

For most users, having autosave and revisions is something that can help make work more efficient. If you write and edit often, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if you have 200 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing around 4,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 4,000 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 400MB.

Fortunately, there are several free plugins for WordPress to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

This plugin deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and database content belonging to each revision such as relationships, meta data, tags, and more.

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

Log into your WordPress admin section, then go to the main navigation menu and click on select 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 can be safely removed from the WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

A table of revisions stored in your database will display on the screen …

(Better Delete Revision – Posts revisions list)

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

(Clear list of revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The redundant data will be removed from your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Revisions removed)

As WordPress automatically saves all post revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you have turned the feature off). After a period of time and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible …

(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)

Like the other plugins described in this section, you can also use the plugin to keep the site’s database optimized …

(Optimize the site’s database – Better Delete Revision)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WordPress database tables need optimization and provides an easy one-click table optimization function without the need to log into your server control panel or use technical tools …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your 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)

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 an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you do database maintenance tasks like:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Page)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting unnecessary page and post revisions and checking if your WP database tables need to be optimized, this plugin also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• Display database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after scheduled database cleanups
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – Settings)

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

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

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

In addition to the above plugins, you can view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Manage Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(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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