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.
Managing Content Revisions – WordPress Plugins
As soon as you edit and save your posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions for your content in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions section at the bottom of your page editor …
(WordPress post revisions list)
Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help create a more effective workflow. If you write and edit extensively, however, over time the 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 50 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing around 1,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 100MB.
Fortunately, there are some great plugins for WordPress that can help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at some of these:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)
This plugin deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and other database content related to each revision like tags, meta data, relationships, and more.
After the plugin has been installed and activated, the plugin can perform optimizations on your database without having to log into your server.
Log into your WordPress site, then go to the navigation menu and choose click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …
(Settings Menu – 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 deleted from your WP database …
(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)
Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post entry, the plugin displays a list of post revisions stored in your WP database …
(Posts revisions – Better Delete Revision)
Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to delete all list items from the database, or abandon the operation and exit the tool …
(Better Delete Revision Manager – Delete posts revisions list)
The unnecessary revisions will be cleared from the database …
(Revisions deleted)
After a period of time and depending on the amount of content you have published on your site, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins storing all post revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …
(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)
Like the other plugins described further below, you can also use this plugin to optimize the site’s database …
(Optimize the site’s database)
Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database tables need optimization and provides an easy one-click table optimization routine without the need to log into your server panel or mess with technical tools …
(Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click database table optimization routine)
For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)
OptimizeDatabase not only lets you remove unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following:
- Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
- Delete unused tags
- Delete ‘expired transients’
- Exclude selected tables and/or specific pages/posts 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 performing tasks such as removing unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and checking if the database tables need to be optimized, this plugin also lets you do the following:
- Enable/Disable comments for published posts
- Removal of trashed comments
- Mobile device friendly
- Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
- Clear out the post trash
- Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
- Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
- Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
- See database table statistics
- E-mail notifications after automatic database cleanups
- Marks dangerous cleanup options in red
- And more!
(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings)
For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress
WP Sweep
(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress)
WP Sweep lets you clean up unused, duplicated, and orphaned data in the WordPress database, including post revisions. This plugin cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Unapproved comments
- Orphaned term meta
- Duplicated post meta
- Unused terms
- And more!
(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress – 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
In addition to the above plugins, you can view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …
(Add New Plugins – 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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