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 Post Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you edit and update pages and posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions section below the post or page …

(Post Editor section – Viewing the revisions box)

For most users, having autosave and revisions is no doubt something that can help make work more productive. If you write or edit often, however, the revisions can start building up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(As you write more posts on your site, your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 100 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing around 1,500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,500 revisions, the total space wasted is about 150MB.

The good news is that there are a number of free plugins that can help you 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)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant post revisions from your database and other database content related to each revision such as relationships, meta information, tags, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, the plugin can optimize your WP database without having to log into your server.

Log into the administration area and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

A table of post revisions stored in the database will be returned on the screen …

(Posts revisions – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ below the list to remove all items from the database, or abandon the operation and exit the page …

(Remove list of post revisions)

The unnecessary data will be cleared from your WP database …

(Post revisions deleted)

As WordPress automatically stores your new revisions, the process will automatically begin again (unless you have turned the feature off). After a period of time and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website and their associated post revisions, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins saving post revisions again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use the plugin to optimize the site’s database …

(Better Delete Revision – Optimize your database)

The plugin checks to see if your WP database needs to be optimized and lets you run an easy one-click database table optimization routine that does not require you to log into your hosting control panel …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only can be used to prune unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (with the option to keep an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click table cleaning and optimization routine, it also lets you do the following:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude selected pages/posts and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings Page)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to performing tasks such as removing redundant revisions of pages and posts and performing cleaning and optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Removal of akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Remove all transient options
• Clear out post trash
• 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
• Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications after automatic database cleanups
• Displays dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize WP Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep WP Plugin)

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

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

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin Settings Screen)

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 “Post Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(Plugins Menu – Add 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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