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 Plugins

As soon as you update a post or page, WordPress begins to store new revisions of the content in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions box at the bottom of your page or post …

(Post Editor section – The WordPress revisions box)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help create a more productive workflow. If you write or edit often, however, 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.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if there are 100 posts on your site and each post has 10 revisions your database could be storing around 1,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions, the total space wasted is about 100MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin removes redundant revisions of posts from your database as well as database content associated with each revision like meta information, tags, relationships, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, Better Delete Revision can perform optimizations on your database without having to log into your server.

Log into your WP Dashboard and select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager screen. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate how many redundant post revisions you can delete from your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

A table of revisions stored in the database will be returned on the screen …

(Posts revisions)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to delete all list items from the database, or cancel the operation and exit the Better Delete Revision screen …

(Clear list of post revisions)

The unnecessary post revisions will be deleted from the WP database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – List of revisions removed)

After a period of time, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin saving all revisions again …

(WordPress automatically begins storing all post revisions again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to optimize your database …

(Keep your site’s database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if your WordPress database tables need to be optimized and provides an easy one-click table optimization function without requiring you to log into your server panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your database tables need to be optimized)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions)

OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to delete unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (with the option to keep an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and checks if your database tables need cleaning and optimization, it also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Screen)

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 removing redundant revisions of pages and posts and performing table optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Removal of stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Remove all transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Option to 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
• E-mail notifications on automatic cleanups
• Highlights potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize WP Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress)

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 comment meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep 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

To view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your WordPress database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Plugins Menu – Add Plugin)

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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