How to delete your WordPress revisions

If you’ve been writing a blog for a while and revisited any of your posts you might have noticed that they have many saved “revisions” accompanying them. The older the posts, they more they have, some are likely to have dozens of saves.

The reason is, WordPress continually saves post instances, even for published posts, so can you revert to them later if you so desire.

The problem is, these posts exponentially bloat your WordPress database file with otherwise useless data, which will inevitably slow the performance of your database.

When disabling this myself, I had around 130 posts and over 1400 revisions which made up around 80% of my database file. As time goes by you can imagine how much more redundant data is added.

If you wish to disable this feature for your own WordPress blog simply add the following code to your wp-config file in the root directory of your WordPress installation.

/** Stops WordPress continually saving revisions */
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

Don’t forget!

As always, back up your database before making any changes. If you’re not confident, plenty of WordPress support information is available before you get started.