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 new post revisions in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions section below your page editor …

(View the WordPress revisions list – Post Editor section)

For most users, having access to functions like autosave and revisions is undoubtedly something that can help make work more efficient. If you write or edit often, however, after a while the number of revisions can start building 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 you have 50 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your database could be storing up to 1,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 1,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 100MB.

Fortunately, there are several free plugins available that can help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are a few:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin)

Better Delete Revision deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and database content related to each revision like tags, relationships, meta data, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can optimize your WordPress database without having to log into your server.

In the Dashboard menu, choose Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Settings – Better Delete Revision)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager screen. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate how many redundant post revisions you can safely delete from the database …

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

A table of revisions stored in your WP database will display on the screen …

(Posts revisions list)

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

(Clear list of revisions)

The redundant post information will be cleared from the database …

(List of revisions cleared)

As WordPress automatically stores all new revisions, the process will automatically start again (unless you have turned the feature off). After a period of time, therefore, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as light as possible …

(WordPress automatically begins storing your revisions again!)

You can also use the plugin to optimize your database …

(Keep the WordPress database optimized)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database needs to be optimized and provides a one-click optimization maintenance routine that does not require you to log into your server control panel or mess with technical tools …

(Better Delete Revision checks if the WordPress database tables need to be optimized)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision Plugin

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 prune redundant page and post revisions (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of the most recent revisions) and checks if your database needs to be optimized, it also lets you do the following:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude specific pages/posts and tables 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)

In addition to cleaning unnecessary page and post revisions and checking if your WP database tables need to be optimized, WP Optimize also lets you do the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of spam comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site on the go)
• Remove all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization scheduling
• Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• Receive email notifications after scheduled cleanups
• Marks dangerous cleanup items in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP-Optimize

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep Plugin)

In addition to optimizing your database tables and deleting unnecessary post revisions, WP-Sweep also cleans up:

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

(WP-Sweep Plugin – Settings Panel)

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

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 search for keywords like “Manage Post Revisions“, “Database Optimize“, etc …

(Plugins Menu – Add Plugins)

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

***

***