WordPress has a really cool feature that you can’t miss. It is called Revisions and it works like a time-machine for your posts/pages content. When enabled, this feature allows you to restore an older version of your post/page content.
This may come handy if you have erased content and want to have it back. It is also good when your page content get’s messy due to a wrong HTML construction or Page Builder issue.
The Revisions panel is located under the post content and it will show all the revisions that are available (if you are creating a new post this panel is not visible!). If after saving a post and changing the content the panel is still not visible, please click on Screen Options on the top right of your screen and activate it. If you can’t see the Revisions option under Screen Options it is because it is disabled on your current WordPress installation (we’ll cover this situation just below).
Managing The Revisions Availability
So, every time you edit a post/page a copy of the older content is kept on the database. This may lead into a huge database with a lot of information that is not necessary (specially if you have content that has been changed multiple times).
Large databases tend to slow everything down and we don’t like slow websites, do we? Luckily we can have control on the number of revisions that is kep and it requires editing the wp-config.php file. So, if you want to limit the revisions number to 5 the code to add is:
If you are crazy and want to disable the revision feature completely try this cool feature:
There’s no magic number here and it is up to you to decide about the number of revisions. As a reference, I would say that keeping 5 revisions is enough.
Final note: revisions are ON by default and they are all kept, but if you don’t have access to this feature it is because it was disabled by the hosting company that hosts your website.
