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 create, edit, and update posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions list at the bottom of your page or post …

(Post Editor section – Viewing the Post revisions box)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt features that help make work more productive. If you write a lot of content, 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 be able to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 100 posts on your site and each post has 10 revisions your database could be storing around 1,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,000 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 100MB.

The good news is that there are some great (and free) plugins available to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin removes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and database content belonging to each revision like meta data, relationships, tags, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, the plugin can perform optimizations on your WordPress database.

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

(WP Settings – 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 WordPress database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions related to each post entry, the plugin will then calculate and return a table of post revisions stored in the database …

(List of revisions – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Remove list of post revisions)

The unnecessary revisions will be cleared from the database …

(Post revisions list cleared)

As WordPress automatically stores all new post revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off). After some time has passed and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website and their associated post revisions, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins to store all revisions again!)

You can also use the plugin to optimize your WordPress database …

(Keep the database optimized – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your WordPress database tables need to be optimized and lets you perform an easy one-click WordPress database table optimization routine without requiring you to log into your server control panel or mess with complicated applications …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click optimization routine)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to prune redundant revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the WP database tables need cleaning and optimization, it also lets you perform the following optional tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin Settings Panel)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to performing tasks such as removing unnecessary post and page revisions and checking if your WP database needs cleaning and optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do database maintenance tasks such as:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Remove trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• 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 schedules of optimization
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications after automatic database cleanups
• Displays dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphan term meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP Sweep 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

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

(Add New – 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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