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 edit and update a page or post, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions list below your content editor …

(Post Editor screen – View the Revisions list)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt functions that help create a more effective workflow. If you write a lot of content, however, the 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.

(As you write more posts on your site, your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 10 posts on your site with an average of 5 revisions each you could be storing around 500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 500 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 50MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin removes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database as well as other database content associated with each revision such as relationships, meta data, tags, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can use the plugin to optimize your database.

In the Dashboard menu, select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(Better Delete Revision – List of revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ below the list to delete all items from the WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Remove posts revisions list)

The redundant post revisions will be cleared from the database …

(Revisions list deleted)

As WordPress automatically stores your new post revisions, the process will automatically start 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 and their associated post revisions, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as light as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

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

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

The plugin checks to see if your WordPress database tables need to be optimized and runs an easy one-click optimization maintenance routine without the need to log into your hosting control panel or mess with technical software …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

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 prune unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (with the option of keeping a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if your database tables need optimization, it also lets you perform optional maintenance tasks such as:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude selected posts/pages and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

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

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize WP Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning redundant revisions of pages and posts and performing WP database table optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Remove unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Remove all transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• 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
• E-mail notifications on scheduled cleanup
• Highlights dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize WordPress Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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

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

(WP-Sweep WP Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

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

(Add 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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