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 revisions of your content in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions list at the bottom of your page editor …

(Post revisions box – Post Editor section)

Having access to workflow functions like autosave and revisions is a timesaver. If you write often, however, after a while the revisions can start building up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

(As post revisions accumulate, 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 database could be storing up to 1,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 100MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

This plugin removes redundant post revisions from your database and other revision-related content like relationships, meta data, tags, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can perform optimizations on your WordPress database without having to log into your server.

In the Dashboard menu area, click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision Manager)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – List of post revisions)

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

(Delete posts revisions – Better Delete Revision)

The redundant items will be cleared from the database …

(Better Delete Revision – Revisions deleted)

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

(WordPress will automatically begin saving all revisions again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep your site’s database optimized …

(Optimize your site’s database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the WordPress database needs optimization and performs a one-click table optimization maintenance routine without the need to log into your hosting panel or use complicated software …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click WordPress database table optimization routine)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you prune redundant page and post revisions (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if your database tables need optimization, it also lets you perform the following optional tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WP Plugin – Settings Panel)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to removing unnecessary post and page revisions and performing cleaning and optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications on scheduled cleanups
• Displays dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin – Settings)

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

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep)

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

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphan user meta
• Duplicated term meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin Settings Panel)

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 WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(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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