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 WordPress Plugins

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

(Revisions list)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt functions that help create a more productive workflow. If you write extensively, however, the number of revisions can start building up. This can significantly increase 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 300 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions you could be storing up to 6,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 6,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 600MB.

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

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Plugin)

This plugin deletes redundant post revisions from your WordPress database as well as other revision-related content such as relationships, tags, meta data, and more.

After the plugin has been installed and activated, the plugin can perform optimizations on your database.

Log into your WordPress Dashboard and choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click the ‘Check Revision Posts’ button to calculate how many redundant post revisions can be removed from the WP database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions associated with each post entry, the plugin display a list of revisions stored in the database …

(List of revisions)

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

(Delete list of revisions)

The redundant post revisions will be cleared from your WordPress database …

(List of post revisions cleared – Better Delete Revision)

After some time has passed and depending on the amount of content you have published on your website and their related post revisions, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WP database as light as possible, since WordPress automatically begins saving your new post revisions again (unless you have turned the feature off) …

(Post revisions automatically start being stored again!)

Like the other plugins described further below, you can also use the plugin to keep the site’s database optimized …

(Keep your database optimized)

The plugin checks to see if your database needs optimization and provides a one-click optimization function that does not require you to log into your server control panel …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision – WordPress 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 prune redundant revisions of posts and pages (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if the WP database tables need to be optimized, it also lets you do the following:

• Delete trashed pages, posts, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ’orphan post meta items’
• Exclude specific pages/posts and tables from cleaning and optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings Page)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin)

In addition to removing redundant post and page revisions and performing table optimization maintenance, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable comments for published posts
• Remove akismet metadata from comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• 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 optimization scheduling
• See database table statistics
• E-mail notifications after automatic database cleanup
• Marks dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – Settings Page)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WPSweep Plugin – Settings Screen)

For more details, go here: WP-Sweep WP 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 database, go to Plugins > Add New and search for keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize Database“, etc …

(Add New – 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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