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 Using Plugins

As soon as you edit and update pages and posts, WordPress begins to store revisions for your content in its database. These show up in a Revisions box below the page editor …

(Post Editor section – Viewing the post revisions list)

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

(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 you could be storing around 4,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 4,000 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 400MB.

The good news is that there are several plugins to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant post revisions from your database as well as other revision-related content such as meta information, tags, relationships, and more.

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

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

(Settings Menu – 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 can be safely deleted from your WordPress database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions related to each post, the plugin returns a table of revisions stored in your database …

(Posts revisions)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button to delete all list items from your database, or choose the ‘No, …’ button to exit the page with all post revisions undeleted …

(Delete list of revisions)

The redundant revisions will be removed from your database …

(Better Delete Revision – Revisions list removed)

After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site and their related post revisions, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin storing your revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …

(Revisions automatically start being saved again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use this plugin to keep the database optimized …

(Keep your WP database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if the WordPress database tables need to be optimized and provides an easy one-click table optimization feature without requiring you to log into your server panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision 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 post and page revisions (with the option of keeping a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click table cleaning and optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you perform the following:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress – 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 removing redundant page and post revisions and performing table optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Remove 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 optimization scheduling
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications on scheduled cleanups
• Marks dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin – Settings Panel)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin)

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

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

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

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

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

(Add Plugins – WordPress 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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