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 – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and save a post/page, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions box at the bottom of the content editor …

(Post Editor section – Viewing the post revisions list)

Having access to workflow features like autosave and revisions is no doubt something that can help make work more efficient. If you write a lot of content, however, after a while the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

(Your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 100 posts on your site and each post has an average of 15 revisions your database 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 some great free WordPress plugins available to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database as well as other revision-related content such as tags, relationships, meta information, and more.

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

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

(Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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 the database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions belonging to each post, the plugin calculates and displays a list of revisions stored in your WordPress database …

(Posts revisions – Better Delete Revision)

Click on the button below the list to delete the items from the database, or choose the ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ button to cancel the operation and exit the plugin with all post revisions undeleted …

(Better Delete Revision – Remove list of revisions)

The unnecessary post revisions will be removed from your WP database …

(Revisions cleared)

After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin storing all new post revisions again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off) …

(Revisions automatically start again!)

Like the other plugins listed in this section, you can also use the plugin to keep the WordPress database optimized …

(Keep your site’s database optimized – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The plugin checks to see if the WordPress database tables need to be optimized and runs a one-click optimization routine without requiring you to log into your hosting panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only lets you remove redundant page and post revisions (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click table optimization routine, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

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

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

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin)

In addition to cleaning redundant revisions of posts and pages and checking if your database needs optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do database maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Removal of stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• 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 scheduling
• View database table statistics
• E-mail notifications on scheduled database cleanup
• Marks dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – Settings)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep WP Plugin)

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

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

(WP Sweep – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep 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 search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New Plugin)

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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