WordPress Plugins For Managing WordPress Post Revisions

In this tutorial, we look at a number of WordPress plugins that will help you manage your post revisions.

WordPress Plugins For Managing WordPress Post Revisions

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 create, edit, and save your pages/posts, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions list at the bottom of your post or page …

View the revisions box

(View the post revisions box)

For most WordPress users, having features like autosave and automatic revisions is very useful. If you write and edit often, however, after a while the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to be able to manage your revisions.

Your WordPress database could be storing lots of unnecessary data

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 200 posts published on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing up to 4,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 4,000 post revisions, the total database space wasted is about 400MB.

Fortunately, there are a number of free plugins for WordPress available to help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Let’s take a look at some of these:

Better Delete Revision

Better Delete Revision Plugin

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant post revisions from your database and other revision-related content such as tags, meta data, relationships, and more.

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

In your Dashboard menu, choose Settings > Better Delete Revision

Settings Menu - Better Delete Revision

(WordPress 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 safely remove from your WordPress database …

Better Delete Revision Manager - Check Revision Posts

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

A list of revisions stored in your database will display on the screen …

List of post revisions

(Posts revisions list)

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

Clear posts revisions list - Better Delete Revision

(Remove posts revisions list – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The redundant post revisions will be removed from your WP database …

Revisions cleared

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Revisions removed)

Tip

As WordPress automatically saves your new post revisions, the process will automatically begin again. After some time has passed and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as lean as possible …

WordPress will automatically begin to save your revisions again!

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize the WP database …

Better Delete Revision - Keep your site's database optimized

(Optimize your WordPress database)

The plugin checks to see if the WordPress database tables need optimization and provides an easy one-click database optimization function that does not require you to log into your server panel …

Better Delete Revision checks if your database needs optimization

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions - WordPress Plugin

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only lets you prune redundant post and page revisions (with the added option to keep an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the database tables need to be trimmed, cleaned, and optimized, it also lets you perform the following:

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions - WordPress Plugin Settings Page

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin Settings)

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

WP Optimize

WP Optimize - WordPress Plugin

(WP Optimize WP Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as deleting unnecessary revisions of posts and pages and checking if the WordPress database needs optimization, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:

  • Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
  • Removal of stale spam comments
  • Mobile device friendly
  • Remove trackbacks and pingbacks
  • Clear out the 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
  • View database table statistics
  • E-mail notifications after automatic cleanups
  • Displays dangerous cleanup operations in red
  • And more!

WP-Optimize - Settings Page

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize Plugin

WP-Sweep

WP Sweep Plugin

(WP-Sweep)

In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary revisions, this plugin also cleans up:

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

WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress - Settings Panel

(WPSweep – WordPress Plugin Settings)

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

Simple Revisions Delete

Simple Revisions Delete
Simple Revisions Delete – WordPress plugin

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.

Publish box - Revisions: Purge link.
Click the Purge link to delete post revisions from your WordPress database.

For more details, go here: Simple Revisions Delete

WP REVISIONS CONTROL

WP Revisions Control
WP Revisions Control

This plugin lets you specify the number of revisions retained for each post type in the Settings > Writing screen.

WP Revisions Control Settings
WP Revisions Control Settings.

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 type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

WordPress Plugins Menu - Add Plugins

(Add New – WordPress Plugins Menu)

We hope that you have found the above information on plugins that will help you manage your WordPress post revisions useful.

WordPress Plugins For Managing WordPress Post Revisions

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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum

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Originally published as WordPress Plugins For Managing WordPress Post Revisions.