WordPress Plugins For Managing WordPress Post Revisions

In this tutorial, we look at a number of WordPress plugins that will help you manage your post revisions.

WordPress Plugins For Managing WordPress Post Revisions

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.

Page & Post Revision Management Using Plugins

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

The post revisions list - Post Editor section

(The WordPress revisions box)

For most users, having functions like autosave and automatic revisions is a timesaver. If you write or edit a lot of content, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

As you write more posts, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data

(Your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 100 posts on your site and each post has an average of 10 revisions you could be storing up to 1,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 100MB.

The good news is that there are several plugins available that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Let’s take a look at a few of these:

Better Delete Revision

Better Delete Revision WP Plugin

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your database and database content related to each revision such as tags, meta information, relationships, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can perform optimizations on your database.

Log into your WordPress dashboard, then go to the navigation menu and click on choose Settings > Better Delete Revision

Settings Menu - Better Delete Revision

(WP Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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

Check Revision Posts - Better Delete Revision Manager

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

Better Delete Revision - Posts revisions list

(Posts revisions)

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

Clear list of post revisions

(Remove posts revisions list)

The redundant items will be removed from your database …

Better Delete Revision Manager - List of post revisions cleared

(Better Delete Revision Manager – List of post revisions removed)

Useful Tip

After a while, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins storing all new revisions again (unless you specifically turn the feature off) …

WordPress automatically begins saving your revisions again!

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

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep your database optimized …

Optimize your database

(Better Delete Revision – Optimize your database)

The plugin checks to see if the WordPress database needs to be optimized and lets you perform an easy one-click optimization routine without the need to log into your hosting panel …

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

(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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you remove unnecessary post and page revisions (with the added option of keeping an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the WP database tables need to be optimized, it also lets you perform the following optional tasks:

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin - Settings Screen

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin Settings Panel)

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

WP-Optimize

WP Optimize Plugin

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning unnecessary page and post revisions and checking if your WP database tables need cleaning and optimization, this plugin also lets you do maintenance tasks like:

  • Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
  • Removal of spam comments
  • Mobile device friendly
  • Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
  • Clear out the post trash
  • Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
  • Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
  • Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
  • See database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
  • E-mail notifications on scheduled cleanup
  • Displays potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
  • And more!

WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress - Settings

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

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

WP-Sweep

WP-Sweep - WordPress Plugin

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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

  • Auto drafts
  • Unapproved comments
  • Orphaned term relationships
  • Duplicated comment meta
  • Unused terms
  • And more!

WPSweep WordPress Plugin - Settings Page

(WP Sweep – WordPress Plugin Settings)

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

Simple Revisions Delete

Simple Revisions Delete
Simple Revisions Delete – WordPress plugin

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.

Publish box - Revisions: Purge link.
Click the Purge link to delete post revisions from your WordPress database.

For more details, go here: Simple Revisions Delete

WP REVISIONS CONTROL

WP Revisions Control
WP Revisions Control

This plugin lets you specify the number of revisions retained for each post type in the Settings > Writing screen.

WP Revisions Control Settings
WP Revisions Control Settings.

For more details, go here: WP Revisions Control

For more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Post Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

Plugins Menu - Add Plugin

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New)

We hope that you have found the above information on plugins that will help you manage your WordPress post revisions useful.

WordPress Plugins For Managing WordPress Post Revisions

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Originally published as WordPress Plugins For Managing WordPress Post Revisions.