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 Plugins

As soon as you update your posts and pages, WordPress begins to store revisions of your content in its database. These show up in a Revisions list below your page or post …

(View the post revisions list)

Having access to features like autosave and revisions is a timesaver. If you write a lot of content, however, the number of 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 there are 200 posts on your site and each post has 15 revisions your WordPress database could be storing an extra 3,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 3,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 300MB.

The good news is that there are some really great free WordPress plugins available to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WordPress Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and other revision-related content like relationships, tags, meta data, and more.

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

In your WordPress admin area, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate how many redundant post revisions can be safely removed from your database …

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions associated with each post, the plugin display a list of post revisions stored in your WP database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Posts revisions)

Click on the button below the list to remove all items from the database, or exit the tool with your post revisions undeleted …

(Remove posts revisions list)

The unnecessary items will be cleared from the database …

(Revisions cleared)

As WordPress automatically saves all new revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you specifically turn the feature off). After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as lean as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start being stored again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use the plugin to optimize your WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Keep the database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your WP database tables need to be optimized and provides a one-click table optimization feature without the need to log into your server panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you prune unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if the database needs to be optimized, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning unnecessary revisions of posts and pages and checking if the WordPress database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, WP Optimize also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Remove stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Removal of all transient options
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• Receive email notifications on automatic cleanups
• Highlights dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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

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

(WP-Sweep 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

In addition to the above plugins, you can 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 Database“, etc …

(Add 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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