THE Plugin to Speed Up WordPress Blogs

WordPress as we know is a database, but sometimes we forget how a database operates and that leads to our blog sites slowing down.

We know that too many plugins grind our sites to a halt, but what about posts and pages and, in particular, revisions?

When WordPress 2.6 came out, one of the wonderful features was saving revisions of posts.

This meant if you lost connection mid-type you could easily restore a copy of the post from the revisions. The system was kind enough to inform you if there was a newer version in the database.

It was blogging bliss, no more posts lost to oblivion, just find a revision, click the link and continue as usual.

You can find the revisions underneath your posts section. You’ll need to be an administrator to see them.

Each revision is stored in the WordPress database.

As you can see above, one post has seven revisions; that’s seven versions stored away for a rainy day. Now imagine having 2,000 posts on your blog. That’s at least 14,000 posts in your WordPress database and probably 12,000 more than you expected, and that’s slowing your site down.

How do you get rid of these revised posts?

There’s a plugin that removes all the revised posts very swiftly – Better Delete Revision. It also removes extra meta tags and other superfluous data.

Search for it in the WordPress plugin section of your dashboard and load it straightaway.

Then locate the plugin the settings section, click the check revisions button and it will tell you how many post revisions you have.

As you can see even with just 139 posts, one of my client’s sites has 1052 additional posts stored.

Just hit delete and they’re gone.

This plugin doesn’t delete posts in drafts or published posts and pages, it just gives your WordPress database a spring clean and helps it to run faster.

If you’ve never done this, it takes about 2 minutes and you’ll be surprised at how many you have. Over at Birds on the Blog we had an additional 22,000 posts stashed away in our database!

I suggest you add this to your monthly WordPress maintenance schedule – it makes a big difference if you have a lot of posts.

PS – it also helps to optimize your WordPress Database

Just click the other button, instead of check revisions.