Someone on your team updated the About page yesterday. Today the paragraph about your founder is gone, the opening hours are wrong, and nobody is quite sure what it said before. Before you start rewriting from memory, stop. WordPress has very probably kept the earlier version.
Every time a page or post is saved, WordPress stores a copy called a revision. You can compare those copies side by side and restore an old version of a WordPress page in a couple of clicks. This post shows where revisions live, how to read the comparison screen, what autosave does, and where revisions stop being useful.
What WordPress saves, and when
There are two kinds of saved copy, and they behave differently.
- Revisions are created each time someone clicks Save draft, Publish or Save (Update in older versions). Each one records the title, the content and the excerpt as they were at that moment, along with who saved it and when.
- Autosaves happen in the background while you type, roughly every minute. WordPress keeps only one autosave per user for each post, and it is overwritten each time. Its job is to rescue unsaved work if your browser crashes or your connection drops, not to keep history.
For a slip made a few minutes ago, the editor’s Undo arrow is quicker, as our WordPress block editor guide explains. Revisions are for anything older than the current editing session.
Be clear about what a revision does not contain. The featured image, the page template, categories and tags, the parent page, and most settings stored by plugins (your SEO title, for instance) are generally not part of it. Restoring a revision brings back the words and the blocks; it does not roll back the rest of the page’s settings.
Find the revisions for a page
- Open the page or post in the editor.
- Open the settings sidebar and select the Page (or Post) tab.
- Look for Revisions with a number beside it. Its exact position has moved between WordPress versions; in recent ones it sits near the top of the panel with the other summary details.
- Click it. WordPress opens the Revisions screen.
If you see no Revisions item at all, there are two likely reasons. The page may have been saved only once, so there is nothing earlier to compare with. Or revisions may be switched off on your site, which some hosts and developers do; more on that below.
Reading the comparison screen
The Revisions screen has a slider across the top and two columns underneath. Each notch on the slider is one save. Drag it, or use the Previous and Next buttons, to step through them.
- The left column shows the earlier version and the right shows the later one.
- Text that was removed is highlighted in red on the left. Text that was added is highlighted in green on the right.
- Above the columns you will see who made each save and how long ago.
To compare two versions that are not next to each other, tick Compare any two revisions. The slider then gets two handles, and you can set one on last month’s version and one on today’s to see everything that changed in between.
The comparison shows the underlying block markup as well as your words, so you will see lines like “wp:paragraph” or “wp:image” around the text. Ignore those and read the sentences; they are how WordPress records which block is which.
How to restore an old version of a WordPress page
- On the Revisions screen, move the slider until the right-hand column shows the version you want back.
- Read it through. Make sure it really is the right one, especially if several people edit the site.
- Click Restore This Revision.
- WordPress takes you back to the editor with that content in place. On a published page, the restored version is live straight away.
- Check the page settings that revisions do not cover, such as the template and featured image, and correct them by hand if they also changed.
Restoring is not destructive. WordPress saves the restore as a new revision, so the version you replaced is still in the list. If you restored the wrong one, open Revisions again and step forward.
Rescuing only one paragraph
Often you do not want to undo every change, only to get one lost section back. In that case do not restore. Instead, open Revisions, find the version with the missing text, select it in the left or right column and copy it. Close the screen, return to the editor and paste it into the current page. Everything else stays as it is.
The autosave message
Sometimes when you open a page, WordPress shows a notice saying there is an autosave of the post that is more recent than the version below, with a link to view it. This usually means someone was editing, made changes, and left without saving, or their browser closed.
Click the link to compare the autosave with the saved version. If the autosave contains work you want, restore it. If it is old, abandoned editing, ignore the message and carry on; it will be replaced the next time you work on the page.
Page builders keep their own history
If a page was built with Elementor or another builder, the WordPress Revisions screen is much less helpful. Builders store the layout in their own data, so the comparison may show little or nothing you can read.
Use the builder’s history instead. Elementor has a History panel with two parts: Actions, which lets you step back through changes made in the current editing session, and Revisions, which lists saved versions you can preview and apply. Other builders have similar features under their own names. Our guide to editing an Elementor page shows where its panels sit.
The Site Editor also keeps revisions for templates, template parts and global styles, so a header or colour change in a block theme can usually be rolled back from there.
Revision limits, and why a page may have none
By default WordPress keeps every revision, with no upper limit. On a site that has been edited for years, a busy page can collect a great many. That is mostly harmless, but some site owners and hosts cap the number to keep the database tidy.
The cap is set with a line in the site’s wp-config.php file called WP_POST_REVISIONS. Set to a number, WordPress keeps that many per post and drops the oldest. Set to false or 0, revisions are switched off entirely, which is why some pages show none. Some database clean-up and performance plugins also offer to delete old revisions. If you rely on history, check what those settings are doing before you need it.
A sensible middle ground for most business sites is to keep a modest number per page rather than none. If you are unsure, leave it as it is and ask whoever manages your hosting; editing wp-config.php by hand can take a site down if a character is wrong.
What revisions are not
Revisions are a history of one page’s content. They are not a backup of your site. If a plugin update breaks the layout, a page is permanently deleted, or the database is damaged, revisions will not help, because they live in that same database. For that you need proper backups stored away from the server; our guide to backing up a WordPress website explains how.
They are also not a full record of who did what across the site. Revisions show who saved a page, but not who changed a setting, installed a plugin or deleted a user. For that, see tracking who changed what in WordPress, one of the user-management topics in our WordPress management guide.
Frequently asked questions
Do revisions slow down my website?
Not for visitors in any way you would normally notice. Revisions are stored in the database but are not loaded when someone views a page. A very large number can make the database bigger and some admin screens slower, which is why some sites cap them. Deleting them all rarely makes a public page faster.
Can I see who made a particular change?
Yes, for content. Each revision on the comparison screen shows the user who saved it and when. That tells you who saved the version that removed a paragraph. It will not show changes to settings or plugins, and if several people share one login, it cannot tell them apart.
Will restoring a revision change the page’s address?
No. Restoring brings back the title, content and excerpt, but the slug is a separate setting and stays as it is now. If an older version had a different title, the restored title will appear, but the address will not change unless you edit the slug yourself.
Can I delete revisions I do not want?
Not one by one from the Revisions screen. WordPress has no delete button there. Database clean-up plugins can remove old revisions in bulk, and a revision limit in wp-config.php trims them automatically. Take a backup before running any bulk clean-up, because deleted revisions cannot be brought back.
If revisions are switched off on your site, or you have found that your backups would not actually let you recover a page, that is worth fixing before you need it. Our WordPress monthly maintenance plan covers backups and safe updates as routine work, so recovering a page does not depend on luck.
Next in this series: WordPress Page Templates and Full Width Pages
