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 update your pages/posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions box at the bottom of your post or page …

(Viewing the revisions box)

Having features like autosave and automatic revisions is undoubtedly very useful. If you write and edit often, however, the number of 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.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

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

Fortunately, there are a number of free WordPress 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)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and other database content related to each revision like tags, relationships, meta information, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can use the Better Delete Revision Manager to optimize your WP database.

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

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be deleted from your database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Posts revisions list)

Click on the button below the list to remove the items from your WordPress database, or choose the ‘No, …’ button to exit the page with all post revisions undeleted …

(Delete list of revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The unnecessary post information will be cleared from the database …

(List of post revisions deleted – Better Delete Revision)

After a while, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins saving your new post revisions again (unless you specifically turn the feature off) …

(WordPress will automatically begin to store all new revisions again!)

Like the other plugins described further below, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize the WP database …

(Optimize the database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database tables need optimization and lets you perform a one-click database table optimization routine that does not require you to log into your server control panel or use complicated applications …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the database tables need to be optimized)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you remove redundant page and post revisions (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if your WP database needs to be optimized, it also lets you do the following optional maintenance tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings Page)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize WP Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting redundant revisions of pages and posts and performing optimization maintenance, this plugin also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Remove unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• Receive email notifications on automatic cleanups
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned term relationships
• Duplicated comment meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WPSweep – WordPress Plugin Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep

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 search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New Plugins)

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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