The Autosave and Revision functions of WordPress are one of those “features” the coders of WordPress must have thought we couldn’t live without, because they didn’t give us a way to manage their function. Not even a decent plugin can control all of the disabling/enabling of both nor the interval of the Autosave.
The only thing we could do with a plugin is to disable the Autosave, but that will only fix half of our problems. We still can’t control Autosave intervals and we can turn on/off revisions. Both of these items require editing a WordPress file which is a big no-no to most programmers.
The mainstream thought to coding for WordPress is, if you don’t like how it works, make a plugin, widget or make/modify a theme to do what you want, but never modify the WordPress files. In this instance we don’t have a choice so why bother with half of the solution being in a plugin and the other half in editing a WordPress file. I say just edit the file.
Change the Autosave Interval
In the wp-settings.php file on line 527 you will see the following line:
define( 'AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 60 );
Change 60 to the number of seconds you wish to set the interval to.
Disable Autosave
add the following line in wp-setting.php on line 528
wp_deregister_script('autosave');
Now autosave will be disable.
Note: If you are going to disable the Autosave there is no need to mess with the interval.
Turn revisions off
In the wp-setting.php file on line 576 you will see the following line
$default_constants = array( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS' => true );
Change true to false and it will be disabled.
With this set to false a single revision will still be created for each update. however this revision record will continue to be overwritten with each save. So there will no longer be a revision-1, revision-2, etc… There will only be the single revision entry.