How To Disable Post Revisions

By default Wordpress will keep all the revisions of your posts in its database. I don't know for you, but for me this means that for each post I have, there are 30-40 more post revisions behind it, causing my database to be unreasonably large and bulky.

There is a very easy way to change this and that is by adding the following line to your wp-config.php file:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', FALSE);


With this line you tell Wordpress to stop keeping revisions of your posts. Of course I understand that this might not be exactly what you are after. Perhaps you don't want to have 30-40 revisions for each of your posts but you would like to have the last or even the last 2 of your revisions always available for you in case you want to revert back to them. For this add the following:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 1);


You can replace "1" with any number of your choice depending on how many revisions back you want to keep in your database.

How To Delete Post Revisions

Now that you have set the number of revisions that you like Wordpress to keep for you, it's time to get rid of all the rest of the revisions that are causing your database to be bulky and slow. To do this, go again to phpMyAdmin (like we did in the "Optimize Database Tables" section) and run the following SQL query:

DELETE a,b,c FROM wp_posts a WHERE a.post_type = 'revision' LEFT JOIN wp_term_relationships b ON (a.ID = b.object_id) LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta c ON (a.ID = c.post_id);

That's it, your old revisions are now removed.

How To Set Up Wordpress To Automatically Empty The Trash

One last thing that you can do to avoid a bulky database is to empty the trash. By default Wordpress stores anything deleted in the trash folder for 30 days. This feature has been introduced with Wordpress 2.9 and it takes a lot of the database memory.

To decrease the number of days to let's say 10 and reduce the database memory occupied, add the following line in the wp-config.php file:

define('EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS', 10 );

That's it! From now on your database will be lighter and more responsive with your Website. Let me know if you have any problems with this.