What Post Details Are Stored in WordPress Revisions?
We develop the PublishPress Revisions plugin that allows you to submit, moderate, approve, and schedule revisions.
This plugin is built on top of the core revisions feature in WordPress.
Our Revisions Pro plugin is able to capture all of the data that has changed in your WordPress posts. However, that is not true of the normal revisions feature. People often tell us that their revisions are missing data.
By default, the revisions feature captures only a small sub-set of all the changes made to a post. In this tutorial, we'll show you exactly what data is stored in WordPress revisions.
Video guide to the data in revisions
Text and image guide to the data in revisions
This image shows the data that is stored in normal revisions:
What this means in practice is that only these three items are stored inside WordPress revisions. In the image below, you can see three areas: Title, Content, Excerpt. No other changes are recorded.
What this means is that the WordPress revisions system does not record information from any of the areas shown below. If you change the Permalink, Categories, Tags, Featured Image, Discussion, or Post Attributes, your only option will be to restore those settings manually.
The same thing applies for most extra features you can add to WordPress posts. For example, custom fields are not stored in WordPress revisions and most plugin settings are not either.
With most plugins, the best you can hope is that the Title and main body content are saved in revisions. For example, in the popular “The Events Calendar” plugin, only the Title and Body are saved by revisions:
Some plugins, such as WooCommerce, go so far as to disable revisions entirely.
Some other plugins, such as Elementor, do use the default revisions system but build their own systems on top.
Revisions Summary
By default, WordPress saves the most important information in your posts: the title and body text. You can use the revisions feature to undo changes to this data.
However, beyond those basic fields, there are no guarantees. Most data is not saved for WordPress posts, and plugins have varying levels of support.