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Christian Ahrweiler
Christian Ahrweiler

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WordPress Revisions: Keep the Useful Ones, Clean the Rest

WordPress revisions are useful.

They let you recover older versions of posts and pages, compare changes, and undo mistakes. While writing or editing, that safety net is valuable.

The problem starts when revisions grow forever.

On a small site, this may not matter. On an older blog, shop, magazine, or documentation site, revisions can quietly become a large part of the database.

Every small edit creates history. Over months or years, that history can become database weight nobody really needs anymore.

The solution is not always to delete everything.

A better idea is a retention policy. Keep a few useful revisions per post. Remove very old ones. Let the site keep a safety net without storing unlimited history forever.

atec Revisions helps with this by showing revision stats, age, content size, and age buckets. It also supports retention settings like keeping 0, 2, 5, 10, or unlimited revisions per post, plus manual or weekly cleanup by age.

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