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 Using Plugins

As soon as you create, edit, and save a post or page, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions section at the bottom of the page or post …

(WordPress revisions list – Post Editor section)

Having features like autosave and revisions is undoubtedly a timesaver. If you write or edit a lot of content, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to also be able to manage your revisions.

(Your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if you have 250 posts on your site and each post has 10 revisions your WordPress database could be storing around 2,500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,500 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 250MB.

Fortunately, there are various plugins for WordPress available to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision)

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

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

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

(WordPress Settings – Better Delete Revision)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate the number of redundant post revisions you can safely delete from the WordPress database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions belonging to each post, the plugin will then calculate and display a list of post revisions stored in the WordPress database …

(Posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to remove all list items from your database, or exit the plugin screen with all post revisions undeleted …

(Better Delete Revision – Clear list of revisions)

The redundant post information will be removed from the WP database …

(Revisions deleted)

After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin saving all revisions again …

(Revisions automatically start being stored again!)

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

(Keep the WordPress database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if the WordPress database needs to be optimized and provides a one-click table optimization maintenance routine that does not require you to log into your hosting panel or use complicated database management software …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you delete unnecessary revisions of posts and pages (with the added option to keep an ’x’ amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform a one-click database optimization routine, it also lets you perform the following optional tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings Page)

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize WP Plugin)

In addition to deleting unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and checking if your database tables need optimization, this plugin also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Remove stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove transient options
• Clear out the 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 has been cleared
• Receive email notifications after automatic cleanup
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin Settings Page)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphan comment meta
• Duplicated post meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP-Sweep – Settings Panel)

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

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

(Add Plugins – WordPress Plugins Menu)

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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