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 save a page/post, WordPress begins to store new revisions for the content in its database. These show up in a Revisions box at the bottom of your content editor …

(The WordPress revisions box – Post Editor screen)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help create a more productive workflow. If you write and edit extensively, 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)

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

Fortunately, there are some great (and free) plugins that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database as well as database content associated with each revision such as relationships, meta data, tags, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, the plugin can optimize your database.

In your WP Dashboard, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate how many redundant post revisions you can safely delete from the WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post, the plugin calculates and displays a table of post revisions stored in the WP database …

(List of post revisions)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button to remove all list items from your database, or select the ‘No, …’ button to cancel the process and exit the plugin with all post revisions undeleted …

(Delete posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The unnecessary post revisions will be deleted from your WP database …

(Post revisions list deleted)

As WordPress automatically saves your new revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you have turned the feature off). After a while and depending on the amount of content you have published on your site and their associated post revisions, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as light as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use this plugin to keep your site’s database optimized …

(Better Delete Revision – Keep the site’s database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WordPress database tables need to be optimized and provides a one-click WordPress database table optimization feature that does not require you to log into your server panel …

(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 – WordPress Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to remove redundant post and page revisions (with the option of keeping an ‘x’-amount 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 maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude certain tables or even specific pages/posts 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 Plugin For WordPress

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to deleting redundant page and post revisions and performing table cleaning and optimization maintenance, this plugin also lets you perform maintenance tasks such as:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Removal of stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all transient options
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• Display database table statistics
• E-mail notifications on scheduled cleanup
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings Panel)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep)

In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary revisions, WP Sweep also cleans up:

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphan term meta
• Duplicated user meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WPSweep Plugin – Settings Panel)

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

(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.

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