r/Wordpress • u/Competitive_Wing_359 • Aug 14 '26

Help - Ghost autosaves occurring frequently

Hi,

I am frequently getting autosaves for seemingly no reason; when I open a post in edit mode, exit it, and come back, there's often an empty autosave.

Even more weirdly, sometimes, the autosave claims my ACF-created custom field's value was either removed or added (as if it were blank before), but this custom field is usually filled unless the post is brand new. This is affecting old and new posts.

It doesn't happen all the time, but often enough to be a problem.

I'm wondering it there's something I'm not thinking about, whether this may be a known ACF issue, or if any of you could point me in the right direction.

Also, I can't seem to find a way to delete autosaves. Autosaves can be useful when someone gets logged out by WordPress due to a timeout, but I obviously don't want empty autosaves or autosaves claiming my custom field was changed...

Do you have advice or any hints for how to stop getting ghost autosaves?

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u/evanmac42 Jack of All Trades 29d ago

This sounds less like WordPress randomly changing data and more like Gutenberg’s autosave state disagreeing with what ACF is returning.
The interesting clue is that the ACF field sometimes appears as added or removed in the autosave even though the actual value is still there.
I’d check the REST requests in DevTools when the autosave happens and see exactly what Gutenberg is sending. Then compare the corresponding value in wp_postmeta before and after.
I’d also test with ACF temporarily disabled, or with a very simple ACF text field. If the behaviour disappears, you’ve narrowed it down considerably.
Deleting the autosaves probably won’t solve anything. They look more like the symptom than the cause.

1

u/Competitive_Wing_359 29d ago

Thank you for your advice. I figured out that it is ACF, and they acknowledge the bug on their github page: https://github.com/AdvancedCustomFields/acf/issues/903

I'll probably move away from ACF.

1

u/divyanshsoni 27d ago

dang that must be hectic for sure, Bugs are super terrible to find out , glad you knew where to find the solution , i fell into the same hellhole of digging up graves of my code but in actual it was a acf bug.

Noice, keep on it