All the plugin would do is set a particular constant value or hook the “wp_revisions_to_keep” filter. Both accomplish the same thing. The benefit of a plugin is it likely provides a simple setting where you can easily specify the limit. So even though they’re old, they likely still work fine. Are they still safe? Likely, but I cannot guarantee it.
I know you don’t want to do any coding, but this is about as simple as coding can get. Add this line to wp-config.php:
define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 5 );
You may change the 5 to any reasonable positive integer value you like. Insert this line immediately above this one that should already be there:
/* That's all, stop editing! Happy publishing. */
The greatest difficulty here is in downloading the file for editing, then uploading the new version back. This is commonly done via FTP, but if you don’t already have an FTP connection set up it’ll be easier to use your hosting account’s file manager to download/upload the file.
Even though the change is simple, I recommend keeping a backup copy of the current file version so it can be easily reverted to should anything go wrong.
@bcworkz, thanks very much for your reply. I appreciate that you went into detail about how to code this change. And because of this, I decided to give it a try.
I feel that I paid attention to your instructions, and was able to add this coding to the wp-config.php file successfully. My hosting company provides an in-house File Manager tool, so I did not have to use an ftp program. The problem is that after I coded the change, and then logged out and logged back into my WP site, the revisions still showed what they were previous to the coding change. I set the coding to 3 instead of 5 revisions. It seems that editing the file was pretty simple. What other troubleshooting can I do? Other than clearing the page cache, are there other ways to clear the revisions that are still present? Do I need to download a plugin temporarily to clear the revision count back to zero?
Ah yes, I should have mentioned that the added code only affects new revisions. Any existing revisions remain. Sorry for the omission.
Removing existing, undesired revisions is a lot more complicated. I recommend looking at some DB clean up plugins for one that will remove excessive revisions for you.
But keep the code you’ve added so you will no longer accumulate more excessive revisions.
In case you were wondering, define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 5 ); is absolutely safe and secure because it’s all static, there can be no influence from outside, or from within for that matter.
Super helpful!! I just downloaded and ran an optimizer plugin for database clean-up, etc., and it worked great.
Thanks again for your assistance, Michael
