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.
Content Revision Management Using Plugins
As soon as you create, edit, and save a post/page, WordPress begins to store new revisions of your content in its database. These show up in a Revisions list at the bottom of the page or post …
(The revisions box – Post Editor section)
Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more productive. If you write and edit often, however, over time the number of 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 there are 100 posts published on your site and each post has 15 revisions your WordPress database could be storing an extra 1,500 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,500 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 150MB.
The good news is that there are several plugins for WordPress available that can help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are some of these:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision Plugin)
This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and other revision-related content like relationships, tags, meta data, and more.
After installing and activating the plugin, you can use it to optimize your WP database.
In your WordPress Dashboard, choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …
(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings)
This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager screen. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be safely deleted from your database …
(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)
Depending on the number of posts and revisions associated with each post, the plugin returns a list of post revisions stored in your database …
(Better Delete Revision – List of post revisions)
Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to clear all list items from your database, or abandon the process and exit the plugin …
(Clear list of revisions – Better Delete Revision)
The unnecessary items will be removed from your database …
(Post revisions list removed)
After a while, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin saving all revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …
(WordPress automatically begins saving post revisions again!)
Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use this plugin to keep your database optimized …
(Keep the site’s database optimized – Better Delete Revision)
Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database tables need to be optimized and provides an easy one-click optimization feature that does not require you to log into your server panel …
(Better Delete Revision checks if the WordPress database needs optimization)
For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress
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 remove redundant post and page revisions (with the added option of keeping a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if your database tables need cleaning and optimization, it also lets you do optional maintenance tasks like:
- Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
- Delete spammed comments
- Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
- Exclude certain pages/posts and tables from cleaning and optimization
- Create a log file of the optimizations
- And more!
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin Settings Panel)
For more details, go here: Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin
WP Optimize
(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin)
In addition to cleaning redundant page and post revisions and performing WP database optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:
- Enable/Disable comments for published posts
- Removal of trashed comments
- Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
- Remove all transient options
- 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
- View database table statistics
- Receive email notifications after scheduled cleanups
- Displays potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
- And more!
(WP Optimize – Settings Panel)
For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin
WP Sweep
(WP Sweep Plugin)
WP Sweep lets you clean up unused, duplicated, and orphaned data in your WP database, including revisions. This plugin cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Spammed comments
- Orphan user meta
- Duplicated term meta
- Transient options
- And more!
(WPSweep – Settings Page)
For more details, go here: WP-Sweep
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 WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Manage Post Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …
(WordPress Plugins Menu – Add New 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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