WordPress saves revisions of each blog post into the database. These additional database entries make your database larger and may cause your website to function slower. If you maintain your own WordPress website, you may consider deleting post revisions on a regular basis or turning that feature off entirely.

Why Post Revisions Exist

There may be cases where you incorrectly changed a blog post and want to go back to an older version. Blog revisions allow you to do this. Based on the type of content you maintain, you may also want to show revisions on your public website and allow visitors to view older versions of a blog post. There are actually plug-ins that allow you to display these revisions at the bottom of your blog posts.

Post Revisions Options

Removing Old Revisions

To remove old revisions from your database, you can run the line of SQL code below. Note that if you changed your database prefix from “wp_” to something else, be sure to edit that portion of the code below before running it.

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision"

Turning Off Revisions

To turn off post revisions, you must access your wp-config.php file. Within this file, add the following code on a blank line..

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );

Summary

Before making any changes to your database and configuration file, think carefully about whether you will need post revisions for any reason. Once you change these settings, it will be difficult or impossible to recover the information.