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 Using Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and save your posts/pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions section below the content editor …

(Post Editor screen – View the Post revisions box)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more productive. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if you have 10 posts on your site and each post has an average of 5 revisions your WordPress database could be storing around 500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 500 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 50MB.

Fortunately, there are a few great WordPress plugins available that can 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 WP Plugin)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant post revisions from your database and other revision-related content like meta data, tags, relationships, and more.

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

In your admin menu area, select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

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 remove from your WP database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

A list of revisions stored in your WordPress database will display on the screen …

(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(Remove list of post revisions)

The redundant items will be deleted from the database …

(List of post revisions removed)

As WordPress automatically saves your post revisions, the process will automatically start again. After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as lean as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins to save all new revisions again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use this plugin to optimize your site’s database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Keep the WordPress database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database tables need to be optimized and provides a one-click optimization maintenance routine that does not require you to log into your server control panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision WP 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 delete redundant post and page revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if your WP database needs optimization, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed comments, pages, and posts
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude selected tables and specific posts/pages from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to performing tasks such as removing redundant page and post revisions and performing database table optimization routines, this plugin also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of spam comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Option to 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
• Receive email notifications on automatic cleanups
• Highlights potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize WP Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep)

In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary revisions, this plugin also cleans up:

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphaned term meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WPSweep – WordPress Plugin Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep – WordPress 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 database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Manage Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(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.

***

***