Tutorial: How to Disable or Limit or Delete Autosave Post-Revisions in WordPress

The Tags covered here are: How to Disable or Limit or Delete Autosave Post-Revisions in WordPress, how to disable Autosave in WordPress, how to limit Autosave in WordPress, how delete Autosave posts, how to mass delete Autosave posts, how to disable post revisions, how to disable post revisions and change interval.

What is Autosave Feature or Post revision feature in WordPress:?
It’s a feature by which WordPress CMS automatically saves posts as post-revisions with time stamps, before, after and in between of posting articles.

Advantages of this Feature:
• Most useful when there are multi authors for your blog and different authors and revisions by each author is auto saved for review by admin
• Auto save of posts save loss of draft when your internet connection gets cut off or your browser get closed accidently.(disaster recovery feature

Disadvantages
• Waste of Web space and memory with huge number of auto saved posts
• Confusion and long post page with number of unwanted revisions

Topics to cover
• How to Disable or Switch OFF the Autosave or Post Revision Feature in WordPress.
• How to Limit the number of Autosave posts or Post Revisions
• Delaying or controlling the Autosave time duration
• Doing all the above with a WP Plug-in
• How to Mass delete the Auto saved posts revisions through PHPadmin

How to Disable or Switch OFF the Autosave or Post Revision Feature in WordPress.

Back up the wp-config.php file as the first step. Further open the file in a text editor and insert the below line any where in the page between the PHP

define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’,false);

How to Limit the number of Autosave posts or Post Revisions

Lets imagine you don’t want to completely switch off the Autosave feature but want to limit the number of Autosave s to 2 or 3. then replace the above code in wp-config.php as below

define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’,3);

The best practice is to comment this above line with /* Comment */ so that you know later what you did this for.

Delaying or controlling the Autosave time duration

You also have an option to delay the frequency of Auto save rather than changing the number of Autosave, you could add the line below to the wp-config.php to achieve this change.

define(‘AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL’,600);

Last resort: Using a Plug-in
If you cant do the simple PHP Edit, then only opt for the usage of plug-in since it’s a wastage of memory space adding one more plug-in for such a simple task.

Plug-in download: http://exper.3drecursions.com/2008/07/25/disable-revisions-and-autosave-plugin/

Next: Read this article to learn How to Mass delete the Auto saved posts revisions through PHPadmin using an SQL query.

Hope you enjoyed reading the article and it was helpful, let me know if you have any questions.
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5 Responses to “Tutorial: How to Disable or Limit or Delete Autosave Post-Revisions in WordPress”

1. StephanJade says:

   March 15, 2010 at 9:09 pm

   Nice blog as for me. It would be great to read more about that topic. Thanks for posting that data.

   Reply
2. StephanJade says:

   March 16, 2010 at 2:39 am

   Nice blog as for me. It would be great to read more about that topic. Thanks for posting that data.

   Reply
3. מאמרים says:

   November 19, 2010 at 3:34 pm

   Thank you very much, I was getting frustrated with having so many revisions for each page!

   Reply
   • orangecopper says:

     November 20, 2010 at 1:54 am

     Great – there are some plugins like wp – cleanup that could be also used to remove post revisions using the control panel also.

     cheers
     Josh

     Reply
4. dede says:

   January 6, 2011 at 12:01 am

   This is a very useful post. It is well though out and well presented.

   However,If I could make a suggestion, it would be it much easer for the user if they could copy and paste the line they need into their config file.

   The mouse highlight mode is not working for me.

   Reply