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 update posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions box below the page or post …
(Post Editor screen – View the WordPress post revisions box)
Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more efficient. If you write or edit a lot of content, however, after a while the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly bloat the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able 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 there are 200 posts on your site and each post has an average of 15 revisions your database could be storing an extra 3,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 3,000 revisions of that post, the total database space wasted is about 300MB.
The good news is that there are a number of plugins for WordPress available to help you control and manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:
Better Delete Revision
(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)
Better Delete Revision removes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database and other revision-related content such as tags, relationships, meta data, and more.
After installing and activating the plugin, you can optimize your WP database.
Log into your WordPress site, then go to your navigation menu and click on click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …
(Better Delete Revision – Settings)
This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager screen. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be deleted from your database …
(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)
Depending on the number of posts and revisions belonging to each post entry, the plugin will then calculate and display a list of revisions stored in your database …
(Posts revisions)
Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to clear all list items from your database …
(Delete list of post revisions)
The unnecessary data will be deleted from the database …
(Better Delete Revision – Revisions cleared)
As WordPress automatically saves your new post revisions, the process will automatically begin again. After a while, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WordPress database as lean as possible …
(WordPress automatically begins storing all post revisions again!)
You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your site’s database …
(Keep your site’s database optimized – Better Delete Revision Manager)
The plugin checks to see if the database tables need optimization and provides a one-click optimization feature without the need to log into your server panel …
(Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click table optimization maintenance routine)
For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)
OptimizeDatabase not only lets you delete unnecessary post and page revisions (with the added option of keeping an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the database needs cleaning and optimization, it also lets you perform the following optional maintenance tasks:
- Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
- Delete spammed comments
- Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
- Exclude selected tables and specific pages/posts 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 – WordPress Plugin
WP-Optimize
(WP Optimize – WordPress Plugin)
In addition to performing tasks such as deleting unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and checking if the database needs optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:
- Enable/Disable comments for published posts
- Remove trashed comments
- Mobile device friendly
- Removal of all transient options
- Clean up auto draft posts
- Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
- Add or remove link on WP admin bar
- Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
- View database table statistics
- Receive email notifications on scheduled cleanup
- Displays potentially dangerous cleanup items in red
- And more!
(WP-Optimize WP Plugin – Settings)
For more details, go here: WP-Optimize
WP Sweep
(WP-Sweep WP Plugin)
WP-Sweep lets you clean up orphaned, unused, and duplicated data in your database, including revisions. This plugin cleans up:
- Auto drafts
- Deleted comments
- Orphaned post meta
- Duplicated post meta
- Unused terms
- And more!
(WP Sweep WordPress Plugin – Settings Screen)
For more details, go here: WP-Sweep
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 database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Manage 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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