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 – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you edit and save a page or post, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions section below the post or page …

(Post Editor screen – View the WordPress post revisions list)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt functions that help create a more effective workflow. If you write and edit often, however, after a while the revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

(As you write more posts on your site, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 200 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing up to 2,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 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 various plugins available to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and other revision-related content like tags, meta information, relationships, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, Better Delete Revision can perform optimizations on your WP database.

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

(WP Settings – Better Delete Revision)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate the number of redundant post revisions you can remove from your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(Posts revisions)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Clear posts revisions)

The redundant items will be cleared from your WP database …

(Post revisions removed – Better Delete Revision)

After a while, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins storing your new post revisions again …

(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)

Like the other plugins described in this section, you can also use this plugin to optimize your database …

(Optimize your WordPress database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database tables need to be optimized and provides an easy one-click table optimization function without requiring you to log into your server panel or mess with technical database management tools …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision – WordPress 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 prune unnecessary post and page revisions (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if your WP database needs cleaning and optimization, it also lets you perform the following:

• Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude specific posts/pages and tables from optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

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

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting unnecessary revisions of posts and pages and performing cleaning and optimization maintenance routines, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out the post trash
• 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
• E-mail notifications on automatic database cleanups
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – Settings)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned term meta
• Duplicated post meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WPSweep WordPress Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

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 database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(Add New Plugins – Plugins Menu)

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

***

***