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 posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions list at the bottom of your post or page …

(Post Editor screen – Viewing the WordPress revisions list)

For most users, having functions like autosave and automatic revisions is undoubtedly something that can help make work more productive. If you write and edit often, however, the revisions can start to build up. This can significantly grow 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)

For example, if there are 200 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each you could be storing around 4,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 4,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 400MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your database and other database content associated with each revision like meta information, tags, relationships, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can use it to perform optimizations on your database.

Go to the Dashboard and choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post, the plugin will then calculate and display a table of revisions stored in your WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision – List of post revisions)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button to remove all list items from the database, or choose ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to exit the page with all post revisions undeleted …

(Delete list of revisions)

The redundant revisions will be deleted from the WP database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Post revisions list deleted)

After a while, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins saving your new revisions again …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep your site’s database optimized …

(Optimize the database – Better Delete Revision)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WordPress database tables need optimization and provides a one-click WordPress database table optimization feature without requiring you to log into your server control panel or mess with technical software …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your WordPress database tables need optimization)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you delete unnecessary page and post revisions (with the option to keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and checks if the database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, it also lets you do the following:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to cleaning redundant revisions of posts and pages and checking if your database needs optimization, this plugin also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Remove trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Remove transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• E-mail notifications on automatic cleanup
• Highlights potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin)

In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary revisions, WP-Sweep also cleans up:

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

(WP-Sweep – 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 WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(WordPress 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.

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