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.

Post Revision Management Using Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and update a post or page, WordPress begins to store new revisions for your content in its database. These appear in a Revisions section below the content editor …

(Post Editor screen – Viewing the WordPress revisions list)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help create a more productive workflow. If you write and edit extensively, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat 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 there are 300 posts on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions you could be storing an extra 6,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 6,000 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 600MB.

Fortunately, there are various free plugins for WordPress to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

This plugin removes redundant revisions of posts from your database as well as database content belonging to each revision such as relationships, meta information, tags, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can perform optimizations on your database without having to log into your server.

Go to your Dashboard and choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager screen. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate how many redundant post revisions can be deleted from the WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

A table of post revisions stored in the WordPress database will display on the screen …

(Posts revisions)

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

(Clear posts revisions list)

The redundant post information will be removed from your database …

(List of post revisions deleted)

As WordPress automatically saves all revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you have chosen to turn the feature off). After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as light as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep your WordPress database optimized …

(Better Delete Revision – Optimize the site’s database)

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

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin)

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

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

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

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize)

In addition to deleting unnecessary post and page revisions and performing WP database optimization routines, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove spam comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Remove all transient options
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• See database table statistics
• Receive email notifications after scheduled cleanup
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings Panel)

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 post revisions, WP Sweep also cleans up:

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

(WP-Sweep Plugin – Settings Page)

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

For more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add Plugins)

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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