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 Post Revisions – WordPress Plugins
As soon as you update your posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions section below the post or page …
(WordPress revisions list – Post Editor screen)
Autosave and revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more productive. If you write and 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 also be able to manage your revisions.
(Post revisions can really add up after a while)
For example, if there are 100 posts on your site and each post has an average of 10 revisions you could be storing up to 1,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 100MB.
The good news is that there are some really great (and free) plugins for WordPress to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few of these:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)
Better Delete Revision deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database as well as database content related to each revision like relationships, tags, meta information, and more.
After installing and activating the plugin, Better Delete Revision can perform optimizations on your database without having to log into your server.
Log into your WordPress dashboard, then go to the navigation menu and select select 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 the number of redundant post revisions you can remove from your database …
(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)
A table of revisions stored in your WordPress database will be returned on the screen …
(Posts revisions list)
Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to remove all items from the WP database …
(Remove posts revisions list)
The unnecessary post revisions will be cleared from your database …
(Revisions list deleted)
As WordPress automatically stores your new post revisions, the process will automatically start again. After a period of time and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website and their associated post revisions, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WordPress database as light as possible …
(WordPress will automatically begin saving all new revisions again!)
You can also use the plugin to keep the WordPress database optimized …
(Better Delete Revision – Keep your WP database optimized)
Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database tables need optimization and lets you perform a one-click optimization routine that does not require you to log into your server panel or use technical tools …
(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)
This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you prune redundant revisions of pages and posts (with the option to keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click WordPress database table cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following optional tasks:
- Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
- Delete unused tags
- Delete ‘expired transients’
- Exclude certain tables and specific pages/posts from optimization
- Create a log file of the optimizations
- And more!
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings Page)
For more details, go here: Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
WP-Optimize
(WP-Optimize WordPress Plugin)
In addition to performing tasks such as removing unnecessary revisions of posts and pages and checking if the database needs optimization, this plugin also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:
- Enable/Disable comments for published posts
- Remove stale spam comments
- Mobile device friendly
- Removal of all transient options
- Clean up auto draft posts
- Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
- Add or remove link on WP admin bar
- Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
- See database table statistics
- E-mail notifications on scheduled database cleanup
- Marks potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
- And more!
(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings Page)
For more details, go here: WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin
WP-Sweep
(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress)
WP-Sweep lets you clean up unused, duplicated, and orphaned data in your WP database, including post revisions. This plugin cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Unapproved comments
- Orphaned term meta
- Duplicated term meta
- Transient options
- And more!
(WPSweep Plugin For WordPress – 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
To view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …
(Add New 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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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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