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 save your posts/pages, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions box at the bottom of your page editor …

(View the WordPress post revisions box – Post Editor screen)

Having access to workflow functions like autosave and automatic revisions is no doubt something that contributes to making work more productive. If you write and edit extensively, however, over time the number of revisions can start to build up. This can significantly increase 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 250 posts on your site and each post has 10 revisions your WordPress database could be storing an extra 2,500 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,500 revisions, the total space wasted is about 250MB.

Fortunately, there are several plugins available to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your WordPress 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 and other database content associated with each revision like relationships, tags, meta information, 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 the Dashboard and click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – WordPress Settings)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager panel. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions can be safely deleted from the database …

(Better Delete Revision – Check Revision Posts)

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

(List of post revisions)

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

(Remove posts revisions list)

The redundant revisions will be removed from the database …

(Revisions list removed)

After a while and depending on the number of posts you have published on your site, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your database as lean as possible, since WordPress automatically begins storing your new revisions again …

(Revisions automatically start being saved again!)

Like the other plugins listed further below, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the WP database optimized …

(Keep your WordPress 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 the need to log into your hosting control panel or mess with technical database management applications …

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

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

This plugin is similar to the one described above. It not only lets you delete unnecessary post and page revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of the most recent revisions) and checks if your database tables need to be trimmed, cleaned, and optimized, it also lets you do the following maintenance tasks:

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

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

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

WP Optimize

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to cleaning redundant revisions of posts and pages and checking if the database tables need to be cleaned and optimized, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following maintenance tasks:

• Enable/Disable trackbacks for all published posts
• Removal of stale spam comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site from anywhere)
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• See database table statistics
• E-mail notifications on scheduled cleanup
• Marks 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)

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

• Auto drafts
• Deleted comments
• Orphaned term relationships
• Duplicated term meta
• Transient options
• And more!

(WP Sweep – Settings)

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

In addition to the above plugins, you can view more plugins that can help you manage post revisions and optimize your WP database, go to Plugins > Add New and type in keywords like “Manage Post Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Plugins Menu – Add New Plugins)

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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