What are WordPress revisions and how to clean them?

WordPress stores a record called revision of each saved draft or published update. This system allows you to see what changes were made in each post and page over time. However, as you use WordPress, this can lead to a lot of unnecessary overhead in your WordPress database, which consumes a lot of space and make your site sluggish and bloated.

You can either use our plugin Advanced Database Cleaner to clean-up these revisions or execute the following SQL code (which is used by the plugin) directly via your phpMyAdmin:

DELETE FROM posts WHERE post_type = 'revision'

3 thoughts on “What are WordPress revisions and how to clean them?

  1. Johnny says:

    Thank you so much for the plugin. It is a work of beauty and I so gladly paid for the PRO version. I’ve got a few questions:

    – Will this plugin also clean up revisions of DRAFTS (unfinished posts)? I’d like to clean up revisions only for published posts.
    – Will this plugin work with WPML? I’m looking to clean up the revisions for posts from all languages but worried there might be adverse effects in case it isn’t totally compatible.

  2. SigmaPlugin says:

    You are welcome dear Johnny, thank you for purchasing the plugin.

    – Yes. All revisions will be cleaned even those which are not published yet. However, it is a nice idea to clean only revisions for published posts. I have noted this for future releases.
    – I did not test the plugin with WPML. I will test it as soon as possible and update the FAQ. I will inform you once this is done.

    Thank you for your interesting comment.

  3. Johnny says:

    I did do it for WPML and it worked well. I think this is an important selling point for you. As people with WPML will have many many revisions in their database taking up a lot of space.

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