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 update a post/page, WordPress begins to store new revisions for the content in its database. These appear in a Revisions list at the bottom of the content editor …

(View the WordPress revisions box)

For most users, having access to effective workflow functions like autosave and automatic revisions is a good thing. If you write or edit extensively, however, over time the revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if you have 100 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing around 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 to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and other revision-related content such as relationships, meta information, tags, and more.

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

In the WP Dashboard, choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings – Better Delete Revision)

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 …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

A table of revisions stored in the WP database will be returned on the screen …

(List of revisions)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to remove all items from your WP database, or select the ‘No, …’ button to exit the Better Delete Revision settings page with all post revisions undeleted …

(Clear posts revisions list)

The unnecessary post revisions will be removed from the WordPress database …

(Revisions list removed – Better Delete Revision)

After a period of time, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins to save all revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …

(Revisions automatically start again!)

Like the other plugins described in this section, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your site’s database …

(Keep the WP database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if the WordPress database needs to be optimized and provides an easy one-click optimization function without requiring you to log into your server panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

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 revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click table cleaning and optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you do the following:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as removing unnecessary revisions of posts and pages and checking if the WP database tables need cleaning and optimization, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out post trash
• 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
• Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• Receive email notifications on automatic database cleanup
• Displays dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep WP Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphaned term meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WPSweep WordPress Plugin – Settings Panel)

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

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 type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Plugins Menu – Add 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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