WordPress Plugins For Managing WordPress Post Revisions

In this tutorial, we look at a number of WordPress plugins that will help you manage your post revisions.

WordPress Plugins For Managing WordPress Post Revisions

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 WordPress Plugins

As soon as you update your posts/pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions for your content in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions list at the bottom of the post editor …

The revisions box

(Revisions list – Post Editor section)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help create a more productive workflow. If you write extensively, however, after a while the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

Your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data

(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 old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 200MB.

The good news is that there are a number of plugins to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress database. Here are some of these:

Better Delete Revision

Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant revisions of posts from your database as well as other revision-related content like relationships, tags, meta data, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can perform optimizations on your WP database.

Log into your Dashboard and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision

Better Delete Revision - Settings Menu

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

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

Better Delete Revision Manager - Check Revision Posts

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post entry, the plugin returns a list of post revisions stored in your WordPress database …

List of revisions

(List of post revisions)

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

Delete list of post revisions - Better Delete Revision Manager

(Remove list of revisions)

The redundant revisions will be cleared from the WP database …

Post revisions list cleared

(Better Delete Revision – Revisions list removed)

Tip

As WordPress automatically saves all new revisions, the process will automatically start again. After a while, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WordPress database as light as possible …

Revisions automatically start being saved again!

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

You can also use the plugin to optimize the site’s database …

Better Delete Revision Manager - Keep your site's database optimized

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Optimize the WordPress database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database needs to be optimized and runs a one-click optimization maintenance routine without requiring you to log into your server panel …

Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click WordPress database table optimization routine

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click WordPress database optimization routine)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you delete redundant post and page revisions (with the option to keep an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if your WordPress database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, it also lets you perform the following:

  • Delete trashed comments, pages, and posts
  • Delete unused tags
  • Delete ‘expired transients’
  • Exclude specific pages/posts and tables from optimization
  • Automatically schedule optimizations
  • And more!

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions - Settings

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin – Settings)

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

WP Optimize

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to deleting unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and checking if your database tables need to be optimized, WP Optimize also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

  • Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
  • Removal of spam comments
  • Mobile device friendly
  • Remove transient options
  • Clean up auto draft posts
  • Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
  • Add or remove link on WP admin bar
  • Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
  • View database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
  • Receive email notifications after automatic database cleanup
  • Marks potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
  • And more!

WP-Optimize Plugin - Settings

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP Sweep

WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

  • Auto drafts
  • Unapproved comments
  • Orphan post meta
  • Duplicated post meta
  • Transient options
  • And more!

WP-Sweep - WordPress Plugin Settings

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings Panel)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress

Simple Revisions Delete

Simple Revisions Delete
Simple Revisions Delete – WordPress plugin

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.

Publish box - Revisions: Purge link.
Click the Purge link to delete post revisions from your WordPress database.

For more details, go here: Simple Revisions Delete

WP REVISIONS CONTROL

WP Revisions Control
WP Revisions Control

This plugin lets you specify the number of revisions retained for each post type in the Settings > Writing screen.

WP Revisions Control Settings
WP Revisions Control Settings.

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 search for keywords like “Manage Post Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

WordPress Plugins Menu - Add New Plugin

(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.

WordPress Plugins For Managing WordPress Post Revisions

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Originally published as WordPress Plugins For Managing WordPress Post Revisions.