What is a Revision in WordPress?

The WordPress revision system works like version control for your content. WordPress creates a revision each time you click Save Draft, Publish, or Update, and the editor lets you compare versions and roll back to an earlier one.

That history is a safety net: a bad edit or a deleted section can be undone in a few clicks, which is why we recommend leaving revisions on. The trade-off is storage, because every revision the Content Management System (CMS) keeps is a complete copy of the post’s versioned text fields.

Viewing and restoring revisions

To view a post’s revisions, open it in the editor, open the Settings sidebar, select the Post or Page tab, and click the number next to Revisions. Since WordPress 7.0, that opens a revisions screen with a slider along the top: drag it to step through each version, and use the colored markers beside the scrollbar to jump to changes. Green marks inserted content, red marks deleted content, and yellow marks changed content. When you find the version you want, click Restore.

WordPress 6.9 and earlier use the classic revisions screen, a side-by-side comparison that also has a Compare any two revisions mode. In WordPress 7.0, you can still reach it by clicking Open classic revisions screen in the sidebar.

Revisions vs. autosaves

Revisions and autosaves live in the same system but do different jobs:

• A revision is a lasting snapshot, stored every time you click Save Draft, Publish, or Update. Each one is kept as its own entry in the history unless a revision cap trims the oldest.
• An autosave is a temporary snapshot, taken automatically while you edit (every 60 seconds by default). WordPress keeps at most 1 autosave per user per post, and each new autosave overwrites the last.
• An autosave never overwrites published content. After a crash or a lost connection, WordPress warns you that it has a backup of your post and offers a link to restore it.

How revisions are stored

Every revision is stored as its own row in the posts table of your site’s database, as a child of the original post, and it tracks the title, author, content, and excerpt. Each row holds a complete copy of those fields, not just the lines that changed, so a post you’ve saved 50 times carries roughly 50 full copies of its text. That’s how revisions take up a lot of space on a site with a large content library, and every backup of the database grows with them.

Limiting or disabling revisions

By default, WordPress keeps every revision indefinitely. To change that, set the WP_POST_REVISIONS constant in your site’s wp-config.php file. The WordPress revisions documentation (updated May 1, 2026) lists the accepted values:

• true or -1 (the default): store every revision.
• An integer such as 3: store that many revisions per post, plus 1 autosave per user. For example, define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3 ); keeps the 3 newest, and WordPress deletes older revisions automatically the next time the post is updated.
• false or 0: store no revisions, though WordPress still keeps 1 autosave per user per post.

Skip disabling and set a cap instead, sized to how the site is edited: weigh how often content changes, how many people edit it, how large the database has grown, and whether your backups could recover an older version anyway. For posts that rarely change after publishing, a cap of 3 to 5 is a reasonable example; a heavily edited or multi-author site may want a much higher limit so the history reaches back far enough to be useful. The setting is count-based only: core WordPress has no way to delete revisions by age, so keeping revisions for, say, 30 days requires a plugin. Developers can also fine-tune the limit per post with the wp_revisions_to_keep filter.

Cleaning up old revisions

WordPress has no built-in screen for bulk-deleting revisions, so accumulated ones need one of 3 routes: set a WP_POST_REVISIONS cap and let WordPress trim each post’s history the next time it’s updated, delete them with WP-CLI (list IDs with wp post list --post_type=revision --format=ids, then pass them to wp post delete), or run a database-cleanup plugin. Back up your database first, because deleted revisions can’t be recovered.