Disable or limit post revisions in WordPress
Stop WordPress from storing endless copies of every post, with one line in wp-config.php.
From the archive: first published on mohamedsharaf.net in May 2011. Rewritten and checked in 2026; some details may be out of date.
WordPress saves a revision every time you update a post. On a busy site that becomes thousands of extra rows in the database. One line in wp-config.php controls it:
// Keep only the last 5 revisions of each post
define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 5 );
// Or turn revisions off completely
define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );Use straight quotes and a real false (no quotes around it). My original 2011 version had curly quotes copied from a blog, and PHP doesn’t accept those.
The setting only affects new revisions; old ones stay until you clean them up. Keeping a few is usually wiser than none: they have saved more than one person from a bad edit.