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 Using Plugins

As soon as you save a post or page, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions list below your page or post …

(Revisions box – Post Editor screen)

Having effective workflow functions like autosave and revisions is a great thing. If you write extensively, however, the revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 200 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing up to 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 200MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and database content belonging to each revision such as relationships, meta information, tags, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, Better Delete Revision can perform optimizations on your database.

In your Dashboard, 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 removed from the database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(Posts revisions list)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button to clear all list items from your WP database …

(Clear posts revisions list)

The redundant items will be deleted from the WP database …

(Better Delete Revision – List of post revisions deleted)

As WordPress automatically stores your new revisions, the process will automatically start again. After a period of time, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins storing all new post revisions again!)

Like the other plugins listed in this section, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the site’s database optimized …

(Optimize the WP database)

The plugin checks to see if your database tables need optimization and provides a one-click optimization routine without requiring you to log into your server panel …

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

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

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 prune unnecessary post and page revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click database optimization routine, it also lets you do optional maintenance tasks like:

• Delete trashed comments, posts, and pages
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• Exclude certain tables or specific pages/posts from cleaning and 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 cleaning unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and performing table optimization maintenance routines, WP Optimize also lets you perform maintenance tasks such as:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all transient options
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• 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
• E-mail notifications on scheduled database cleanups
• Marks dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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

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

(WPSweep – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep WP 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 “Post Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(Add New Plugin – 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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