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Whenever you save a draft or update an already published WordPress page or post, the Content Management System (CMS) automatically creates a revision. When enabled, this feature can prevent you from losing important work. Unfortunately, over time, WordPress revisions can take up unnecessary storage space and end up hurting your site’s performance.

In this guide, we’ll introduce you to WordPress revisions and explain where to find them. Then we’ll walk you through how to use revisions and keep them from negatively impacting your site.

Let’s get started!

An Introduction to WordPress Revisions

WordPress revisions automatically record any changes you make to pages or posts on your website. A new copy of a page is created every 60 seconds by default, as well as every time you click on the Save Draft, Publish, or Update buttons.

List of WordPress revisions of a post

WordPress revisions are helpful for any site owner. They serve as backups you can restore in the event of an unexpected disruption, such as closing your browser tab accidentally or having a power outage.

They also enable you to revert to older versions of your content. For example, you might learn that a post isn’t as performing as well as it used to, and you want to roll back some recent changes.

Revisions are also super helpful when you have a team working on your website’s content. In addition to letting you view what post/page edits were made, the WordPress revisions feature also records the username and timestamp of those changes. This can increase transparency and make collaborating on editorial work easier.

The Problem with WordPress Revisions

WordPress revisions can present a serious problem if you don’t manage them properly. Essentially, the more pages and posts you add to your website, the more revisions it’ll generate.

If you have a large website or make changes frequently, this can quickly lead to unnecessary database bloat. That’s because every time a revision is created, an additional row is added in the WordPress database’s wp_post table, with a post_type value of revision.

The larger your database is, the more storage space it’ll occupy. Unfortunately, this can slow your site down and lead to longer loading times, hampering your site’s user experience and search engine optimization (SEO).

Therefore, it’s critical to learn how to control revisions in WordPress to your advantage. Whether you want to delete revisions entirely, disable or limit them, or optimize your revisions database, you have many options at your disposal.

Where to Find Revisions in WordPress

Before discussing the different ways you can use and change the revisions settings in WordPress, it’s important first to understand where to find them. On the editor screen of your post or page, go to the right-hand menu and click on the Document tab.

If revisions are enabled, and changes have been made, you’ll see the number of revisions under the Status & visibility section.

The WordPress revisions tool

Click on this to visit the Revisions page, where you can view all of the saved edits and compare any two revisions side-by-side. You’ll see two columns: the left displays the previous version of the post or page, and the right shows you the version you’ve selected.

The WordPress Revisions page

You can use the revisions slider to browse through the various restore points. This system highlights the content that was added (plus sign and green) or removed (minus sign and red).

If you want to keep the existing version and return to the editor screen without making any changes, you can do so by simply clicking on either the article title or the Return to editor link at the top of the screen.

How to Revert to an Older Revision in WordPress

Sometimes you may want to undo changes made in WordPress. When this happens, WordPress revisions make doing so quick and easy.

By default, WordPress displays the revisions for a post or page sequentially. However, if you want to view or compare non-sequential changes, you can do so by selecting the Compare any two revisions option at the top of the screen:

The option to compare WordPress revisions

Then select the version you want to compare it to. Whenever you’re done viewing and comparing revisions, you can restore an older version by clicking on Restore This Version.

Reverting to an old revision in WordPress

Note that if you click this button, it will automatically restore the version you’re comparing against—the one shown in the revisions screen’s right-side column.

How to Enable WordPress Revisions

Typically, WordPress revisions are enabled by default. However, depending on your hosting provider or the process used to install WordPress, this feature may be disabled. It’s also possible that you or someone else on your team disabled it at some point.

Whatever the case, if you want to enable revisions in WordPress, you can do so manually by editing the wp-config.php file in your site’s root directory. You can do this via a Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) client. If you’re not a Centriohost user and your host uses cPanel, you can use its File Manager tool instead.

Once you locate and open the file, search for the following line of code:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

Change the false value to true.

If there is no line like this, add the following above where it says “ABSPATH” and “/* That's all, stop editing! Happy publishing. */”:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', true);

Enabling WordPress revisions manually

Don’t forget to save the file.

Now, when you log back into WordPress, you should see the revisions feature enabled. To ensure