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 Content Revisions Using Plugins

As soon as you save a post or page, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions box at the bottom of your post editor …

(Post Editor section – View the post revisions box)

For most users, having features like autosave and automatic revisions is undoubtedly a timesaver. If you write or edit a lot of content, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase 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 WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 50 posts on your site and each post has 20 revisions your WordPress database could be storing around 1,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 100MB.

Fortunately, there are some great free plugins available to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WordPress Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database as well as other database content related to each revision such as meta data, tags, relationships, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, the plugin can optimize your database without having to log into your server.

Log into your Dashboard and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WP Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

A list of revisions stored in the WordPress database will be returned on the screen …

(List of revisions)

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

(Clear list of post revisions)

The redundant items will be removed from the WP database …

(Revisions list deleted – Better Delete Revision Manager)

As WordPress automatically stores all new revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you have turned the feature off). After a period of time, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as lean as possible …

(Revisions automatically start again!)

Like the other plugins listed in this section, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize the site’s database …

(Optimize your database – Better Delete Revision)

The plugin checks to see if the WordPress database tables need to be optimized and performs a one-click optimization routine without the need to log into your server control panel or mess with technical database management applications …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you prune redundant post and page revisions (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following optional tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Panel)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting redundant post and page revisions and performing optimization routines, WP Optimize also lets you perform maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Removal of unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Remove all transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• Display database table statistics
• Receive email notifications after scheduled cleanup
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin)

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

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

(WP-Sweep Plugin – Settings Panel)

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

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

(Plugins Menu – Add New Plugin)

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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