Wordpress has the ability to save different revisions of a saved post. While this “roll-back” capability is incredibly helpful, it can lead to database bloat over time.
I’ve been using two plug-ins that I’ve found to be quite useful for keeping revision bloat at bay.
Delete Revision
Delete Revision is a plug-in that does what its name implies and allows you to manually check for, and delete all post revisions in your Wordpress blog and an optimize feature to clean up the database. There are no automatic or scheduled functions.
Upon the first use of Delete Revision, I had over a thousand post revisions clogging up the database! I can imagine that a busy and/or long-lived blog could possibly have well over that number in revisions! That’s quite a bit of data sitting around doing essentially nothing if the post has been finalized and published!
Revision Control
Revision Control allows you to limit the number of revisions or disable them entirely for both post and pages. Oddly, this plug-in is lacking a manually activated deletion function. That’s why I use the Delete Revision plug-in in conjunction with this.
The great thing about Revision Control is that it allows you to still have revisions but limit the maximum number per post/page. The revisions “roll over” so the oldest revision in the list is replaced by a newly saved revision.
These two plug-ins working together can help alleviate the database bloat, especially for busier blogs. Hopefully the Wordpress development team will build more revision control into upcoming versions of Wordpress.
