How to Automatically Delete WordPress Revisions

We develop a plugin called PublishPress Revisions that allows you to submit, approve and schedule changes to your WordPress content.

Revisions are a wonderful feature in WordPress and have saved me many hours of headaches.

WordPress automatically saves a revision for your content every 60 seconds using the autosave feature. So whenever I make a writing mistake in WordPress, I know there's always a revision available so I can fix things.

However, if you have a busy site, and WordPress is constantly saving revisions, you will soon end up with a LOT of revisions. These can slow down your site by filling up your database with unnecessary data. This post explains what data is stored by WordPress revisions.

If you do have a busy site, I do recommend that you delete old revisions to help keep your site running quickly.

One plugin for this purpose is WP Revisions Control.

After installing WP Revisions Control, go to Settings > Writing in your WordPress menu.

Scroll down to the “WP Revisions Control” area and you choose the number of revisions to save for each post type. To keep all the revisions for a post type, leave the field empty. I've chosen 30 as good option for a small site.

If you want more granular control, the WP Revisions Manager plugin allows you to choose the number of revisions for each Post or Page.


More WordPress Revisions Tutorials


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2 Comments

  1. This doesn’t answer my question, and I can’t find anywhere on your site that does answer the question. You think you would have this front and center.

    If I delete all of the revisions (the auto-saved revisions) from my database, does that delete all of the user submitted revisions?

    1. Hi SBA. I presume you’re asking about our “PublishPress Revisions” plugin?

      This is the first time we’ve had that question from a user, so we haven’t written about it yet.

      I tested with the “WP-Optimize” plugin and its “Clean all post revisions” feature. It did NOT delete user submitted revisions.

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