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.

Revision Management WordPress Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and update your posts/pages, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions box below the page or post …

(Post Editor screen – Viewing the Revisions box)

Having access to content workflow functions like autosave and revisions is no doubt a great thing. 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.

(As post revisions accumulate, your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if there are 100 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each you could be storing an extra 1,500 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,500 revisions, the total space wasted is about 150MB.

The good news is that there are various free WordPress 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 removes redundant post revisions from your database and other revision-related content such as meta information, relationships, tags, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can optimize your WordPress database without having to log into your server.

In the main menu section of your Dashboard, select 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 how many redundant post revisions can be safely deleted from the WP database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions associated with each post, the plugin calculates and returns a list of revisions stored in the WordPress database …

(Posts revisions)

Click on the button below the list to clear all items from your WordPress database, or exit the plugin settings screen …

(Remove posts revisions list)

The unnecessary revisions will be cleared from your WordPress database …

(Revisions list deleted – Better Delete Revision Manager)

As WordPress automatically saves all post revisions, the process will automatically begin again. After a period of time, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as lean as possible …

(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the site’s database optimized …

(Optimize the database)

The plugin checks to see if your WP database tables need to be optimized and lets you perform an easy one-click database table optimization routine without requiring you to log into your server control panel or mess with technical database management applications …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

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 remove redundant page and post revisions (with the option to keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if your WordPress database tables need cleaning and optimization, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed comments, pages, and posts
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude certain tables and/or 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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to removing unnecessary revisions of posts and pages and performing optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• 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 scheduling
• Display database table statistics
• Receive email notifications on automatic cleanups
• Highlights dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings Screen)

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

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep WP Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphan user meta
• Duplicated post meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WPSweep WP Plugin – Settings Panel)

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

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 “Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Add New Plugin – 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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