You may have noticed that when you start writing a blog post in WordPress, the post will automatically save every so often. This feature can come in pretty handy, because if you unexpectedly disconnect from the Internet or have a power outage, you won’t lose all of the work that you’ve put into the blog post up until that point. That said, some people find the auto-save feature in WordPress to be more annoying than anything else.

It is possible to either delay or disable the auto-save feature. To set how often WordPress automatically saves your blog post, look for this snippet of code in your wp-settings.php file. This has been confirmed for WordPress 2.5.1.

/**
* It is possible to define this in wp-config.php
* @since 2.5.0
*/
if ( !defined( ‘AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL’ ) )
define( ‘AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL’, 60 );

It is the last line that is of interest to us today. The “60″ part of that line refers to the 60 second interval. If you want WordPress to save every three minutes, change this number to 180. If you want it to save every ten minutes, change it to 600.

If you prefer to disable autosave altogether, a very simple WordPress plug-in can be found on this page. The appropriately named Disable-Autosave WP plug-in does exactly what it says it does. Just upload and activate.

Shout out to Untwisted Vortex for the information.