Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions is a long-running free plugin originally written by Rolf van Gelder of CAGE Web Design and adopted by the WordPress support company NerdPress in 2024. As the name suggests, it started as a revision cleaner that optimises tables afterwards, and it has grown into a simple all-in-one cleanup routine you configure once and then run with one click or on a schedule.

How it works

On the settings screen you tick what should be removed: revisions for posts, pages or custom post types, trashed posts and comments, spam comments, unused tags, expired or all transients, pingbacks and trackbacks, the oEmbed cache and orphaned post meta. Revision cleanup can keep a chosen number of recent revisions per item or only remove revisions older than a set number of days, and a keep_revisions custom field protects individual posts. After cleaning, the plugin runs table optimisation, with options to exclude specific tables and to include InnoDB tables, which are skipped by default.

An Analyze button reports what would be removed before you commit, and an optional log records each run with savings and can be exported to CSV. You can launch it from Tools, an admin bar link or an admin menu icon, schedule it hourly, twice daily, daily or weekly, or trigger it from a Unix crontab where WP-Cron is unreliable. On multisite it is network-activated and one run optimises every site.

Limitations

• Unapproved comments, leftover plugin tables, options and Action Scheduler data are not covered.
• No table repair, InnoDB conversion, autoload tools or WP-CLI commands.
• Settings are all-or-nothing per run rather than item-by-item.
• The last release (5.3.0) was in July 2025, so development is slow.

Who should pick it: bloggers and small sites that mainly want revisions and trash kept under control automatically, with minimal setup and no cost.