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 edit and save a post or page, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions list below your page editor …
(View the WordPress post revisions box)
Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more efficient. If you write or edit often, however, after a while the revisions can start building up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.
(Your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)
For example, if there are 100 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing up to 2,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 200MB.
The good news is that there are a number of plugins to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin removes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database as well as other revision-related content such as tags, relationships, meta data, and more.
After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can optimize your database.
Log into your WordPress site, then go to the main navigation menu and choose choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …
(Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)
This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate how many redundant post revisions can be deleted from your WordPress database …
(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)
Depending on the number of posts and revisions associated with each post, the plugin will then calculate and display a list of post revisions stored in the WP database …
(List of revisions)
Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to delete all list items from your WordPress database …
(Better Delete Revision – Delete list of post revisions)
The redundant data will be deleted from your WordPress database …
(Better Delete Revision Manager – List of post revisions deleted)
As WordPress automatically stores all new post revisions, the process will automatically begin again. After a while and depending on the amount of content you have published on your site and their related post revisions, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as lean as possible …
(Post revisions automatically start again!)
You can also use this plugin to optimize the site’s database …
(Better Delete Revision – Keep your site’s database optimized)
The plugin checks to see if your database needs to be optimized and provides an easy one-click WordPress database optimization maintenance routine that does not require you to log into your server panel …
(Better Delete Revision checks if your database needs to be optimized)
For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you delete unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (with the option to keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if your WP database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, it also lets you do the following:
- Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
- Delete spammed comments
- Delete ‘expired transients’
- Exclude specific pages/posts and tables 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 removing redundant revisions of pages and posts and checking if the database needs cleaning and optimization, this plugin also lets you perform database maintenance tasks such as:
- Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
- Removal of stale spam comments
- Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
- Remove transient options
- Clear out post trash
- 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
- See database table statistics
- Receive email notifications after scheduled database cleanup
- Highlights dangerous cleanup operations in red
- And more!
(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings)
For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin
WP Sweep
(WP Sweep – WordPress Plugin)
In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary revisions, WP Sweep also cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Deleted comments
- Orphan term relationships
- Duplicated term meta
- Transient options
- And more!
(WP Sweep – WordPress Plugin Settings)
For more details, go here: WP Sweep
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 WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …
(Add Plugins – 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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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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