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 create, edit, and update pages and posts, WordPress begins to store revisions for the content in its database. You can see these displayed in a Revisions box at the bottom of the post or page …

(WordPress revisions box – Post Editor section)

For most WordPress users, having autosave and revisions is very useful. If you write or edit extensively, 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 manage your revisions.

(As post revisions accumulate, your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if there are 200 posts published on your site and each post has 10 revisions your database could be storing up to 2,000 copies of unnecessary data. If your post is approximately 100KB data, then with 2,000 post revisions, the total space wasted is about 200MB.

Fortunately, there are some really great (and free) plugins for WordPress available to help you control your revisions and reduce the size of your database. Here are some of these:

Better Delete Revision

(Better Delete Revision Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin deletes redundant revisions of posts from your WordPress database as well as database content associated with each revision such as tags, meta data, relationships, 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.

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

(Better Delete Revision – WP Settings Menu)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

Depending on the number of posts and revisions stored with each post, the plugin return a list of post revisions stored in your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Posts revisions list)

Click on ‘Yes, I would like to delete them! …’ below the list to delete the items from the WordPress database, or select the ‘No, …’ button to exit the page …

(Remove posts revisions list)

The unnecessary data will be cleared from your WP database …

(Post revisions list deleted)

After some time has passed and depending on the number of posts you have published on your website, we recommend repeating this process to keep your database as light as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin saving all new revisions again …

(WordPress automatically begins storing all new post revisions again!)

Like the other plugins listed in this section, you can also use Better Delete Revisions to keep the site’s database optimized …

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

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database tables need to be optimized and provides an easy one-click optimization function that does not require you to log into your server panel …

(Better Delete Revision checks if your database needs to be optimized)

For more details, go here: Better Delete Revision

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions Plugin)

OptimizeDatabase not only can be used to remove redundant page and post revisions (it also lets you keep an ‘x’-amount of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click table optimization maintenance routine, it also lets you do the following optional tasks:

• Delete trashed posts, pages, and comments
• Delete unused tags
• Delete ‘expired transients’
• Exclude certain tables and/or specific posts/pages from optimization
• Automatically schedule optimizations
• And more!

(Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Settings Screen)

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize Plugin)

In addition to cleaning redundant revisions of posts and pages and checking if the database needs cleaning and optimization, WP Optimize also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Remove stale spam comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Remove transient options
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain selected number of weeks data when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• See database table statistics (e.g. how much space has been cleared
• E-mail notifications after automatic cleanup
• Marks dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin – Settings)

For more details, go here: WP Optimize WP Plugin

WP-Sweep

(WP-Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WPSweep Plugin – Settings Screen)

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

In addition to the above plugins, you can view 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“, “Optimize“, etc …

(Plugins Menu – Add New)

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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