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 Content Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you update your posts/pages, WordPress begins to store revisions of your content in its database. These show up in a Revisions box at the bottom of the post editor …

(Post Editor section – The WordPress post revisions list)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt functions that help make work more productive. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, the revisions can start building up. This can significantly grow 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 there are 10 posts published on your site and each post has 5 revisions your database could be storing up to 500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 500 revisions, the total space wasted is about 50MB.

Fortunately, there are a number of free WordPress plugins 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)

This plugin deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database as well as database content related to each revision such as relationships, meta data, tags, 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.

In the Dashboard menu, 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 safely deleted from the WordPress 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 table of revisions stored in your database …

(List of post revisions)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button to delete all list items from the database, or cancel the process and exit the tool …

(Delete posts revisions list)

The redundant post information will be deleted from the database …

(Revisions list removed – Better Delete Revision Manager)

As WordPress automatically stores your new post revisions, the process will automatically start again. After some time has passed, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start being stored again!)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Optimize your WP database)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if the database tables need optimization and provides an easy one-click optimization function without the need to log into your hosting panel or mess with complicated software …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform a one-click table optimization routine)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only lets you remove unnecessary page and post revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if your WordPress database needs cleaning and optimization, it also lets you do optional maintenance tasks like:

• Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
• Delete spammed comments
• Delete ’pingbacks’ and ‘trackbacks’
• Exclude certain tables or specific pages/posts from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize WordPress Plugin)

In addition to removing redundant revisions of pages and posts and performing cleaning and optimization routines, WP Optimize also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Removal of unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove transient options
• Clear out post trash
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• View database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications on automatic cleanup
• Displays dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin – Settings)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep)

WP-Sweep allows you to clean up unused, duplicated, and orphaned data in the database, including revisions. This plugin cleans up:

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

(WPSweep Plugin – Settings Page)

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

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 “Manage Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Add New Plugin – 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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