Different plugin’s or hosting plans can block the usual way of finding post revisions.
I have found one sure-fire way to find your old revisions posts. It’s quick but clunky and a last resort for the desperate so its at the end of this post if you are in a hurry.
If you have any other methods not included in this post – please leave a comment for others.
1. The Usual Way to Find Revision Posts
WordPress will autosave posts as you work on them and save them in the database. Thank goodness for this because you can spend hours working on a post and “poof” it will disappear. Either you did a mistaken “select all” and then hit enter, or delete, or what have you. It’s gone!
For
Just look to the top right on your post page and you will see a tab marked “screen options”. Click on that and in the dropdown you will see a list of options that you can select to make visible on your page. There is where you will find “Revisions”. Just click the box to put a check on this.
If “Revisions” option isn’t there – on to the next possible solution.
2. Inspect wp-config.php file
This file will be found in your root directory. Please read the Caution Editing Files section before you do this.
Check and see if you have this line of code in your wp-config.php file:
define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false );
If so just do as instructed and comment it out so it will look like
// define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false );
If THAT wasn’t it then maybe this next one is the culprit:
3. Check the functions.php File on Plugins
For whatever reason one of your plugins may be resetting your WP_POST_REVISION status to false. Find it and do the same thing as above and just comment it out. Before you do this please read the caution segment of this post.
You can find your plugins in this path /wp-content/plugins
[NOTE] – There is one big problem with this fix.
Every plugin update you get will overwrite your changes.
*CAUTION* About Editing WordPress Files.
When editing files in WordPress you can quickly create a situation where your site is FUBR’d (that’s the acronym from F* Up Beyond Repair).
Before you do any changes on a file be sure to download a copy to your computer first. Once the working copy is safely stored on your computer – you can then use the online editor of your hosting account to make your changes. If you mess things up you can now just upload your “good” copy to overwrite the one you screwed up.
4. Fail Safe Way to Find Post Revisions
This is a little clunky because if you have been working on a few things at a time it can be hit and miss. If you’ve only worked on the one post it’s simple.
Open the post you are trying to find the revisions for in edit mode. In the browser you should see this:
https://yourwebsite.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=######&action=edit
The ##### will actually be a number like 12345
Now take that number and add 1 so it will be 12346
Open a new browser window and copy this:
https://yourwebsite.com/wp-admin/revision.php?revision=12346
replacing the 12346 with the number you came up with.
Unfortunately sometimes you have to enter a few numbers to actually find it which is why it’s clunky. But the numbers will be close.
WordPress Revision Cleanup
When you have a bunch of revisions stored in your database it could be affecting the time loading of your site. Once you are sure you are ready to delete old revisions you can clean them out by using a free plugin called “Better Delete Revisions”