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 create, edit, and save posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions section at the bottom of the page editor …

(Post Editor section – Viewing the revisions list)

Having autosave and revisions is undoubtedly a timesaver. If you write and edit extensively, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 100 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each you could be storing an extra 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 some great plugins for WordPress available to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Let’s take a look at some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant revisions of posts from your database and database content belonging to each revision like tags, relationships, meta data, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, the plugin can perform optimizations on your database without having to log into your server.

Log into your WordPress dashboard, then go to the main navigation menu and select choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

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 your WordPress database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions belonging to each post, the plugin displays a list of revisions stored in the WordPress database …

(List of post revisions)

Click on the button below the list to remove all items from the WP database, or select the ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ button to exit the plugin with your post revisions undeleted …

(Remove posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision)

The unnecessary post revisions will be removed from the database …

(List of post revisions cleared)

As WordPress automatically saves all post revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you specifically turn the feature off). After a period of time, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as light as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

Like the other plugins listed in this section, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the WP database optimized …

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

The plugin checks to see if your WP database needs optimization and performs an easy one-click table optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your hosting panel …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click table optimization routine)

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 remove redundant post and page revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click WordPress database cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed comments, pages, and posts
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude certain tables or specific pages/posts from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and checking if the database needs optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• Receive email notifications on scheduled database cleanup
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize WordPress Plugin – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep WordPress Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphan user meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep WP 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 Post Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Add Plugin – 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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