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 Revisions Using Plugins

As soon as you edit and save your pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions box at the bottom of your page or post …

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

Having autosave and revisions is something that can help make work more productive. If you write or edit extensively, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able 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 with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing an extra 1,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 100MB.

The good news is that there are several free WordPress plugins available that can help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WP Plugin)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant post revisions from your database and other revision-related content such as meta data, tags, relationships, and more.

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

In the Dashboard, choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WordPress Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions related to each post entry, the plugin calculates and returns a list of post revisions stored in your WP database …

(Better Delete Revision – Posts revisions list)

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

(Delete posts revisions)

The redundant items will be removed from your WP database …

(Post revisions deleted)

After some time has passed and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WordPress database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins saving all revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …

(WordPress will automatically begin storing all new post revisions again!)

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

(Optimize your WordPress database – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database needs to be optimized and performs an easy one-click table optimization maintenance routine that does not require you to log into your hosting panel or use complicated database management applications …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

OptimizeDatabase not only lets you prune unnecessary page and post revisions (with the option to keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you perform the following optional tasks:

• Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude certain tables or even specific posts/pages from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

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

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Remove spam comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data 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 can be optimized
• E-mail notifications after scheduled database cleanups
• Marks 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-Sweep lets you clean up unused, duplicated, and orphaned data in the WP database, including revisions. This plugin cleans up:

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphaned term meta
• Duplicated user meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

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 WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Post Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Add New – Plugins Menu)

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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