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.
Content Revision Management Using Plugins
As soon as you create, edit, and save posts and pages, WordPress begins to store revisions for your content in its database. These appear in a Revisions section at the bottom of the content editor …
(Viewing the WordPress revisions box)
Autosave and revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more productive. If you write and edit often, however, the 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.
(Post revisions can really add up after a while)
For example, if you have 200 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing an extra 3,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 3,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 300MB.
The good news is that there are a few great plugins 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:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision Plugin)
Better Delete Revision removes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database as well as other revision-related content like tags, relationships, meta data, and more.
After the plugin has been installed and activated, Better Delete Revision can optimize your database without having to log into your server.
Log into your WordPress dashboard, then go to your navigation menu and select click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …
(Settings – Better Delete Revision)
This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate how many redundant post revisions can be removed from the database …
(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)
Depending on the number of posts and revisions associated with each post entry, the plugin returns a list of revisions stored in your database …
(Better Delete Revision – Posts revisions)
Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to remove all items from your WP database …
(Better Delete Revision – Remove posts revisions list)
The redundant post revisions will be deleted from your database …
(Better Delete Revision Manager – Post revisions list deleted)
As WordPress automatically stores your post revisions, the process will automatically start again. After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site, therefore, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible …
(Revisions automatically start again!)
You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize the WordPress database …
(Keep the database optimized – Better Delete Revision Manager)
The plugin checks to see if the database tables need optimization and provides an easy one-click table optimization function that does not require you to log into your hosting panel or mess with complicated database management software …
(Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click table optimization maintenance routine)
For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)
The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you prune unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if your database tables need optimization, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:
- Delete trashed comments, pages, and posts
- Delete unused tags
- Delete ’orphan post meta items’
- Exclude selected tables or even specific posts/pages from optimization
- Create a log file of the optimizations
- And more!
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings)
For more details, go here: Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
WP-Optimize
(WP-Optimize WP Plugin)
In addition to performing tasks such as removing redundant revisions of pages and posts and checking if the WordPress database tables need cleaning and optimization, this plugin also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:
- Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
- Removal of trashed comments
- Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
- Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
- Clean up auto draft posts
- Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
- Add or remove link on WP admin bar
- Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
- Display database table statistics
- Receive email notifications on automatic database cleanup
- Displays dangerous cleanup operations in red
- And more!
(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings)
For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin
WP-Sweep
(WP-Sweep Plugin For WordPress)
WP Sweep lets you clean up duplicated, unused, and orphaned data in the database, including revisions. This plugin cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Deleted comments
- Orphan term meta
- Duplicated post meta
- Transient options
- And more!
(WP Sweep – WordPress Plugin Settings)
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 WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …
(WordPress 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.
***
"Learning WordPress has been a huge stumbling block for me. I've been looking for something that covers absolutely everything but doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Thank you so much ... you have just provided me with what I have been looking for! Truly appreciated!" - Tanya
***