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 Post Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you edit and save a post or page, WordPress begins to store new post revisions in its database. These appear in a Revisions section below your post editor …

(Post Editor section – Viewing the WordPress revisions box)

Autosave and post revisions are no doubt functions that help create a more effective workflow. If you write and edit a lot of content, however, 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 there are 300 posts published on your site and each post has an average of 20 revisions you could be storing an extra 6,000 copies of old data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 6,000 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 600MB.

The good news is that there are a number of free plugins to help you 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)

Better Delete Revision removes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database and database content associated with each revision such as meta information, tags, relationships, and more.

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

Go to your WP Dashboard and select Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings)

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

(Check Revision Posts – Better Delete Revision)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions related to each post, the plugin return a list of post revisions stored in the WordPress database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Posts revisions list)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ below the list to clear all items from your WP database, or select ‘No, I prefer to keep them!’ to cancel the task and exit the page with all post revisions undeleted …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Clear posts revisions list)

The unnecessary revisions will be deleted from the database …

(List of revisions removed – Better Delete Revision Manager)

As WordPress automatically saves your new post revisions, the process will automatically begin again. After some time has passed, we recommend running the tool again to keep your WP database as lean as possible …

(Post revisions automatically start being saved again!)

You can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep your WordPress database optimized …

(Better Delete Revision – Optimize your site’s database)

The plugin checks to see if your WordPress database needs to be optimized and lets you perform an easy one-click WordPress database optimization routine without requiring you to log into your server panel or mess with complicated applications …

(Better Delete Revision lets you perform an easy one-click optimization routine)

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

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin For WordPress)

The Optimize Database plugin not only can be used to delete redundant page and post revisions (with the added option of keeping a specific number of the most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you perform maintenance tasks such as:

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

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin – Settings Page)

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

WP Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin For WordPress)

In addition to deleting unnecessary post and page revisions and performing WP database table optimization routines, this plugin also lets you do maintenance tasks like:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of stale unapproved comments
• Mobile device friendly
• Removal of all transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to keep data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• 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 on scheduled cleanup
• Displays potentially dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize – Settings Page)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize WordPress Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

• Auto drafts
• Spammed comments
• Orphan post meta
• Duplicated comment meta
• Unused terms
• And more!

(WP Sweep Plugin For WordPress – 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

For 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“, 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.

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