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 update posts and pages, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions list at the bottom of your page or post …

(Revisions box – Post Editor screen)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt functions that help create a more productive workflow. If you write or edit often, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly bloat 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 100 posts published on your site and each post has 20 revisions your database could be storing up to 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 200MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin removes redundant revisions of posts from your database and other revision-related content like relationships, meta information, tags, and more.

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

Log into your WordPress dashboard, then go to the admin navigation menu and select select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post entry, the plugin will then calculate and display a table of revisions stored in your WordPress database …

(List of post revisions – Better Delete Revision)

Click on the ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ button below the list to delete the items from the database, or exit the page with your post revisions undeleted …

(Delete list of post revisions)

The redundant revisions will be cleared from your WordPress database …

(Post revisions cleared)

After a period of time and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website and their associated post revisions, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins storing your new post revisions again …

(WordPress automatically begins storing your post revisions again!)

You can also use the plugin to optimize your WP database …

(Optimize the site’s database – Better Delete Revision Manager)

The plugin checks to see if the database needs optimization and runs a one-click table optimization routine that does not require you to log into your server panel …

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

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you remove redundant 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 to be trimmed, cleaned, and optimized, it also lets you perform the following optional tasks:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – WordPress Plugin Settings)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize – WordPress Plugin)

In addition to performing tasks such as cleaning unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and checking if the WP database needs cleaning and optimization, this plugin also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Remove stale metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Option to 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
• Receive email notifications after scheduled cleanup
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

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

WP Sweep

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Unapproved comments
• Orphan user meta
• Duplicated post meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP-Sweep WordPress Plugin – Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP Sweep WordPress 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

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

(Add New Plugins – Plugins Menu)

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

***

***