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 Revisions – WordPress Plugins

As soon as you edit and update a page or post, WordPress begins to store new revisions in its database. These are displayed in a Revisions list below the page or post …

(Post Editor screen – View the post revisions box)

Autosave and revisions are no doubt features that help create a more productive workflow. If you write and edit often, however, after a while 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.

(Your database could be storing lots of unnecessary data)

For example, if there are 100 posts on your site with an average of 10 revisions each your WordPress database could be storing up to 2,000 copies of old data. If your post averages 100KB data, then with 2,000 revisions, the total database space wasted is about 200MB.

The good news is that there are several free plugins for WordPress available that can help you manage your revisions and reduce the size of your 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 as well as other revision-related content like relationships, meta information, tags, and more.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can optimize your database.

Log into your WordPress dashboard, then go to your navigation menu and select click on Settings > Better Delete Revision …

(Better Delete Revision – Settings Menu)

This brings you to the Better Delete Revision Manager area. Click ’Check Revision Posts’ to calculate the number of redundant post revisions you can remove from your database …

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Check Revision Posts)

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

(Better Delete Revision – Posts revisions list)

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

(Better Delete Revision Manager – Clear list of revisions)

The unnecessary post revisions will be deleted from your WP database …

(Revisions list deleted)

After some time has passed, we recommend repeating this process to keep your WordPress database as lean as possible, since WordPress will automatically begin to store all new revisions again (unless you specifically turn the feature off) …

(WordPress automatically begins storing all new revisions again!)

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

(Keep the database optimized – Better Delete Revision Manager)

Better Delete Revision checks to see if your database needs optimization and provides a one-click table optimization function that does not require you to log into your server control panel or mess with complicated software …

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

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

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 remove unnecessary page and post revisions (it also lets you keep a specific number of your most recent revisions) and lets you perform an easy one-click table optimization routine, it also lets you do database maintenance tasks such as:

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

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

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

WP-Optimize

(WP Optimize WordPress Plugin)

In addition to removing unnecessary revisions of pages and posts and checking if the database needs to be cleaned and optimized, this plugin also lets you perform the following:

• Enable/Disable comments for all published posts
• Removal of trashed comments
• Mobile device friendly (optimize your site anywhere, anytime)
• Removal of all trackbacks and pingbacks
• Clean up auto draft posts
• Ability to retain data from selected number of weeks when cleaning up
• Option to add or remove link on WP admin bar
• Enable/Disable weekly optimization schedules
• Display database table statistics (e.g. how much space can be optimized
• E-mail notifications after scheduled database cleanup
• Marks dangerous cleanup operations in red
• And more!

(WP-Optimize Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)

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

WP-Sweep

(WP Sweep – WordPress Plugin)

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

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

(WP Sweep WP Plugin – 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 type in keywords like “Revisions“, “Optimize“, etc …

(WordPress 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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