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.

Page/Post Revision Management Using Plugins

As soon as you edit and update your pages/posts, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions section below the post editor …

(View the revisions box – Post Editor screen)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help make work more efficient. If you write or edit extensively, however, the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly grow the size of your WordPress database, so it’s important to manage your revisions.

(Post revisions can really add up after a while)

For example, if you have 200 posts published on your site and each post has 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, the total database space wasted is about 300MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision WordPress Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant revisions of posts from your database as well as other revision-related content like tags, meta data, relationships, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, you can use the Better Delete Revision Manager to perform optimizations on your database.

In your WordPress Dashboard, choose 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 the number of redundant post revisions can be deleted from the WP database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions belonging to each post entry, the plugin calculates and returns a table of post revisions stored in the database …

(Posts revisions list)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ to delete all list items from the WordPress database, or choose the ‘No, …’ button to exit the page with all post revisions undeleted …

(Delete list of post revisions)

The unnecessary post revisions will be deleted from the database …

(Revisions list deleted)

After a period of time, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WordPress database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins to store all new post revisions again …

(WordPress will automatically begin storing your post revisions again!)

You can also use the plugin to keep the WP database optimized …

(Better Delete Revision – Optimize your database)

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

(Better Delete Revision checks if your WP database tables need optimization)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin)

The Optimize Database plugin not only can be used to prune unnecessary revisions of pages and posts (with the option to keep an ’x’ amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if the database tables need to be optimized, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

• Delete trashed pages, comments, and posts
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan postmeta items’
• Exclude selected pages/posts and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Create a log file of the optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions WordPress Plugin – Settings Panel)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP-Optimize)

In addition to removing unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and checking if the database needs optimization, WP Optimize also lets you do database maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for published posts
• Remove trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Remove all transient options
• Clear out the post trash
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly schedules of optimization
• View database table statistics
• Receive email notifications on scheduled database cleanup
• Marks potentially dangerous cleanup options in red
• And more!

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphaned user meta
• Duplicated post meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP Sweep WP Plugin – Settings)

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

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

(Add New Plugin – 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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