Did you ever feel that your life should also have some powers like a time machine, where you can go back to your past and make changes into it. Well this is something called Post Revisions in WordPress. In life, I don’t know exactly if we could transform the 4th Dimension as time of the World, but if you are a webmaster you certainly have a time machine to revert back all the changes you have made in your WordPress Posts. WordPress has solution to all your problems.

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In this WordPress tutorial we will learn something about “Post Revision”. WordPress by default has the functionality that allows all of us to revert changes with a single click and watch back the previous version of the post. Each and every time when a editor, author or administrator clicks on ‘Save Draft’ then the revision of the post is saved under the “Post Revision” column.

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That means, every time you write, modify or open any post, it creates a new Instance of that post and saves it as a Post Revision. This is usually not very essential to keep Post Revisions as the size of your database grows on due to so many instances of same posts. Therefore your database becomes bulky and it needs more time to load all your content, making your website comparatively slower.

Why Post Revision is necessary ?

Post Revisions are very much important for a beginner in WordPress. Usually a newbie makes several mistakes while writing post/blog, this mistakes are highlighted when we go through the post/blog twice or thrice, So we change the crucial mistakes that are in the post/blog. Sometimes we also have to change the entire content of the post/blog, so what’s the solution to the changes that were made or content that was deleted.

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Post Revision helps us to go back to the earlier version of the post a bit before the changes that were made. This feature of revision is very much useful for a Multi-Author Website as the admin can keep an eye on the changes made by the editors, author in a specific article.

To find out the ‘Revision’ section in your Blog/Website you can just go to ‘Edit’ link of a post and then scroll down a little, you will find a ‘Revision’ column.

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How to Use Post Revisions to Revert back Changes

If you want to revert back the changes in a post, then just go to the ‘Edit’ screen of a previously saved post in Draft. You will find on the right hand side of the Dashboard the ‘Public’ section where there is an option named ‘Revisions’, Click on the ‘Browse’ link to go to the revision screen. ( See below image )

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On the directed page you will find a screen that will show you all the previous revisions made by the editors. The post on top of the page would be the latest revision that was made. Move the cursor left/right to check out the all the previous revisions.

All the changes made in the revisions would be highlighted in Red and Green colors. The red color is for ‘Deletion’ and the green color is for ‘Addition’. You can also find out the timings and days of the changes on top of the screen.

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If you want to ‘compare’ two revisions then there is an option for this also. Scroll the cursor and compare any two of your choice.

Now if you want to ‘Restore a Revision’ then navigate to the desired revision and click on the ‘Restore this Revision’, WordPress will automatically restore the revision as your post. (See below image )

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It would be pleasure to see your comments if you liked it or do have any queries or doubts, please don’t feel shy !

Related Useful Tips

  • There is a useful plugin named “Revision Control”, which gives the admin to control all the posts revision in one go.
  • Your goal should be minimizing the number of WordPress Plugins you Install in your blog. As every plugin when run on server side requires some time for its execution. Therefore, increasing Page Load Times of your blog and making your site slow. Thus, our goal is to use multi-feature plugins that can do multiple tasks like “Wp-Optimize” that not only optimize your WordPress database but also manages and boost your blog.

Our Plugins Discovery Section :

Some nice and Useful WordPress plugins for managing and optimizing post revisions in your WordPress blog.

  1. Delete Post Revisions
  2. Revisions Control
  3. Revision History
  4. Better Delete Revision
  5. Revert
  6. WordPress Cleanup

One tip for all is not to disable Post Revisions, because there are times when you might need those saved previous instances of your WordPress Posts, and then you might be in trouble. Its always better to delete something when you don’t need it, instead of not using the given free feature of Post Revisions.