Your database backup is 180 MB. It should be 90.
You download a database backup and it's twice the size you expected. You look closer: the wp_posts table has 12,000 rows. Your site has 400 posts and pages. The other 11,600? Revisions. Every draft save, every content tweak, every accidentally-hit Update button, WordPress kept them all. Forever.
A WooCommerce store with 400 products edited an average of 12 times has 4,800 invisible revision rows. They slow down queries, bloat backups, and serve no purpose after the first week.
What most people do instead
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 5);. Requires FTP. Limits future revisions but doesn't clean up old ones.DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = 'revision'. Risky if you get the query wrong. Requires server access.Two commands: limit and clear
TrueCommander gives you two complementary commands. Limit revisions sets a cap on how many WordPress stores going forward. Clear revisions deletes the ones already in the database.
Shown in advanced mode, where commands start with tp. In easy mode you type the same command without the tp prefix.
Limit + Clear = clean forever. Set a limit to prevent future bloat, then clear old revisions to clean up the backlog. The two commands work together.
Two commands, one clean database
tp limit revisions -total=5 keeps max 5 per post. Use -total=0 to disable revisions entirely, or -total=-1 for unlimited.clear revisions deletes all stored revisions. Filter by post type with -post_type=product.| Detail | Value |
|---|---|
| Limit command | tp limit revisions -total=5 |
| Clear command | clear revisions |
| Filter by type | tp clear revisions -post_type=post |
| Disable entirely | tp limit revisions -total=0 |
| Remove limit | tp limit revisions -total=-1 (WordPress default) |
| Can be used in |
Real example
You're managing a WooCommerce store with 400 products. Each product has been edited an average of 12 times. That's 4,800 revision rows in the database doing nothing.
First: tp limit revisions -total=3. From now on, WordPress keeps max 3 revisions per post.
Then: clear revisions. Result: 4,800 revisions deleted. The wp_posts table just lost thousands of rows. Database backup shrunk from 180 MB to 95 MB.
You add clear revisions to a monthly Cron Schedule. The database stays clean without you thinking about it again.
Per-command guides
Each revision command has its own detail page covering the specific parameter surface, type filters for clear, clamping and defaults for limit.
Goes further with TrueCommander
Frequently asked questions
tp clear revisions deletes the revision rows already in the database, and tp limit revisions -total=5 caps how many WordPress keeps from now on, so the bloat does not come back.-post_type, for example tp clear revisions -post_type=product, to scope the cleanup to products, posts, or any single type.-total=0 to disable revisions entirely or -total=-1 for unlimited. The limit is capped at 100.clear revisions runs on a schedule, so add it to Scheduled Commands to run monthly. Set a limit once with limit revisions, which persists as a startup command, and the table never grows the same way again.