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 edit and update posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions section below the page editor …

(Post Editor section – The Revisions list)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more efficient. If you write a lot of content, however, after a while the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if you have 100 posts on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions your WordPress database could be storing around 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 200MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

This plugin removes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database as well as other database content belonging to each revision like relationships, tags, meta data, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, the plugin can perform optimizations on your WordPress database without having to log into your server.

Log into your WordPress admin section, then go to the admin navigation menu and select select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(WP Settings – Better Delete Revision)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be safely removed from your database …

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(Posts revisions list)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Remove posts revisions)

The unnecessary items will be cleared from the database …

(Post revisions list deleted – Better Delete Revision)

As WordPress automatically saves all revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you specifically turn the feature off). After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as lean as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins storing all new revisions again!)

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

(Optimize the WP database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database needs optimization and runs a one-click WordPress database optimization routine that does not require you to log into your server panel or mess with technical applications …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the WP database needs optimization)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision – WordPress 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 delete redundant revisions of posts and pages (with the added option of keeping a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click database cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following:

• Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• Exclude selected posts/pages and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress – Settings Page)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning unnecessary revisions of posts and pages and checking if your WordPress database needs optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Remove all transient options
• Clear out the 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
• Receive email notifications after scheduled database cleanups
• Marks dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize WP Plugin – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep)

WP Sweep lets you clean up orphaned, unused, and duplicated data in the database, including post revisions. This plugin cleans up:

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphaned comment meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings Panel)

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

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

(Add New Plugin – WordPress 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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