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 Revisions Using Plugins

As soon as you edit and update your posts/pages, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These show up in a Revisions box at the bottom of your post editor …

(Post Editor section – Viewing the WordPress revisions box)

Having functions like autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt very useful. If you write or edit extensively, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

(As post revisions accumulate, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 100 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing an extra 1,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,000 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 100MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database as well as other revision-related content like meta information, relationships, tags, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use the plugin to optimize your database.

Log into the admin section and choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings Menu – Better Delete Revision)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(Posts revisions)

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

(Clear list of revisions)

The redundant revisions will be deleted from your database …

(Revisions list cleared)

After some time has passed and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin saving post revisions again …

(WordPress automatically begins storing your new post revisions again!)

Like the other plugins described further below, you can also use the plugin to keep your database optimized …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Keep your WordPress database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if the database needs to be optimized and provides an easy one-click table optimization function without the need to log into your server panel …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you prune unnecessary page and post revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click database optimization routine, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed posts, comments, and pages
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude certain tables or specific posts/pages 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 Plugin For WordPress

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as removing unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and checking if the WP database needs to be cleaned and optimized, WP Optimize also lets you perform database maintenance tasks such as:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
• 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 scheduling
• Display database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after automatic cleanup
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin 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

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 Revisions“, “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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