Keep the history. Lose the clutter.

Keep your WordPress revision history by age, not count.

A busy day of editing shouldn’t erase months of revision history.

WordPress revisions present a familiar tradeoff: limit them by number, and frequent edits can push important older versions out of reach. Keep them indefinitely, and your database can accumulate years of revisions.

Time-based Revision Cleanup takes a smarter approach: keep revisions by age, not count.

Choose how long your revision history should last: 30 days, 90 days, a year, or whatever works for your site. Every revision inside that retention window can be preserved, regardless of how often you edit. Older revisions are automatically cleaned up instead of piling up forever.

Keep the history. Lose the clutter.

Why time-based retention?

Imagine you limit WordPress to 10 revisions. After 10 more edits, the oldest saved version is gone, even if it was an important checkpoint from earlier that morning.

With Time-based Revision Cleanup, you can keep 365 days of revision history (the default) whether you make five edits or five hundred. The retention period, not an arbitrary revision count, determines what gets cleaned up.

It’s a practical balance between useful edit history and long-term database maintenance, particularly for actively maintained websites.

Features

Keep revisions by age, not count. Set a retention period in days and preserve revisions within that window.
Automatic cleanup on save. Remove expired revisions when content is updated, with a configurable execution-time limit.
Optional scheduled cleanup. Use WP-Cron to work through older revisions across the site, including content that hasn’t been edited recently.
Keep editing responsive. When scheduled cleanup is enabled, you can turn off save-time cleanup and let background maintenance handle the work.
Control the workload. Set the scheduled cleanup interval, maximum revisions per run, and execution-time limits.
See the results. View total revisions deleted and cleanup activity over the last 24 hours, 30 days, 60 days, or year to date. Charts use a locally bundled copy of ApexCharts.
Optional activity logging. Inspect cleanup activity when troubleshooting, with logging disabled by default.
Developer-friendly exclusions. Use the crtbr_delete_revision filter to protect specific revisions from deletion.
Works with supported content types. Manages revisions for posts, pages, and custom post types that support WordPress revisions.

No external service, API key, or account is required.