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 update a post/page, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions section at the bottom of your page editor …

(WordPress post revisions list)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more efficient. If you write and edit extensively, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase 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 200 posts on your site and each post has 10 revisions your database could be storing an extra 2,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 200MB.

Fortunately, there are some great WordPress plugins available that can help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

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

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use the Better Delete Revision Manager to perform optimizations on your database.

Go to your Dashboard and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings Menu)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

A list of post revisions stored in your WP database will be returned on the screen …

(List of post revisions)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Remove posts revisions list)

The redundant items will be deleted from the WP database …

(Revisions list cleared)

After a period of time and depending on the amount of content you have published on your site and their related post revisions, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin storing all post revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …

(Revisions automatically start again!)

You can also use the plugin to optimize your WP database …

(Optimize your database)

The plugin checks to see if your WP database tables need optimization and provides a one-click database optimization feature that does not require you to log into your server panel or use complicated database management software …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

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 redundant revisions of pages and posts (with the added option to keep an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if your database needs to be cleaned and optimized, it also lets you perform database maintenance tasks like:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning redundant revisions of posts and pages and checking if your WordPress database tables need to be optimized, WP Optimize also lets you perform maintenance tasks such as:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Removal of stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• E-mail notifications on scheduled database cleanup
• Highlights dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings Screen)

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, WP-Sweep also cleans up:

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

(WPSweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

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

(Add Plugins – 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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