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How to undo changes in WordPress

How to Undo Changes in WordPress (5 Methods) 

Written By: author image Joella Dunn
author image Joella Dunn
Joella is a writer with years of experience in WordPress. At Duplicator, she specializes in site maintenance — from basic backups to large-scale migrations. Her ultimate goal is to make sure your WordPress website is safe and ready for growth.
     Reviewed By: John Turner
reviewer image John Turner
John Turner is the President of Duplicator. He has over 20+ years of business and development experience and his plugins have been downloaded over 25 million times.

Making changes to your WordPress website is easy. But what happens when you make a change you didn’t mean to? 

Accidentally deleting content, breaking your site with a bad plugin, or falling victim to a hack can be incredibly frustrating. But with the right approach, you can undo the damage and revert to a working version of your site.

Ready to become a WordPress “undo” expert? Let’s dive into the different methods for undoing changes in WordPress.

Why You Might Need to Undo Changes in WordPress

There are several common scenarios where you may need to undo changes made to your WordPress site. Let’s talk about a few of them!

Accidental Edits or Mistakes

It’s easy to accidentally delete content, change settings you didn’t mean to, or make other unintended edits while working in WordPress. Rather than trying to recreate the previous state, it’s sometimes faster to just undo the change.

Testing Changes

As a website owner, you might want to test out new plugins, theme settings, page layouts, or other changes. If you do, you’ll need an easy way to roll back your site if you don’t like the results. This way, you can experiment without risk.

Fixing Update Issues

Updates are important maintenance tasks for security and functionality. However, they can sometimes cause conflicts or break parts of your site. Being able to undo the update restores your site while you investigate the issue.

Recovering From Attacks

If your site gets hacked or infected with malware, you’ll want to restore a clean version of your site. This removes any malicious code and gets you back into your dashboard. You won’t lose your site forever!

How to Undo Changes in WordPress

No matter the reason, undoing changes in WordPress can save you hours of headaches and troubleshooting time.

I’ll walk you through the easiest ways to undo changes in WordPress!

Method 1. Restore a Backup

The most beginner-friendly way to undo changes in WordPress is to restore a complete backup of your site. This allows you to revert every element — content, settings, plugins, themes, and more — back to how it was at the time of the backup.

Regularly backing up your site is crucial for this method to work. I highly recommend using a WordPress backup plugin like Duplicator to easily create backups on a schedule.

Duplicator Pro plugin

Duplicator takes snapshots of your entire site – files, database, plugins, and themes – and packages it into a neat zip file. If you ever need to undo changes, you just restore this backup with a single click.

The restore process is incredibly user-friendly. Simply go to Duplicator » Packages and find a backup that was created before the error. Hit the Restore button next to it.

Duplicator restore button

That’s it! In just a few minutes, Duplicator will overwrite your current site with the backup version. Everything will be restored exactly as it was.

You can do the same with cloud backups. Your data will be moved to local storage, allowing you to restore it.

Download Wasabi backup

Remeber, to use this method, you’ll need to create frequent and consistent backups. Other backup options include plugins like UpdraftPlus, hosting control panel backups, or manually backing up your files and database.

Method 2. Restore a Post Revision in the Block Editor

If you only need to undo changes to a specific post or page, WordPress has a built-in revision system. 

Let’s walk through how to restore a post revision in the Block Editor, or Gutenberg.

In the WordPress editor, click the Revisions option in the sidebar.

Open post revisions in the Block Editor

This pulls up the Revisions screen. You’ll see a list of all saved revisions for that piece of content. WordPress will show you what you’ve removed or added to the post.

Block Editor post revisions

If you want to restore a specific revision, click on Restore This Revision

Restore post revision

This restores the previous version of your post or page! You’ll be automatically redirected to the Block Editor for the original content.

This is a quick way to undo recent content changes without affecting the rest of your site!

WordPress will also automatically save your post even if you don’t hit Save Draft, Publish, or Update. These autosaves will be with the post revisions. You can restore them the same way you restored post revisions. 

The revisions feature only tracks changes to the text content itself. It won’t undo any setting changes, new plugin installs, WordPress theme customizations, or other site updates. It’s limited just to the content body.

Method 3. Restore a Post Revision in the Classic Editor

If you’re still using the Classic Editor for managing WordPress posts and pages, the process for restoring revisions is very similar.

When editing a post or page, you’ll see a number of revisions on the right-hand side. Hit Browse to see the different versions.

Open post revisions in the Classic Editor

Like with the Block Editor, use the slider to view all of your revisions. You’ll see a split screen showing the differences between the current draft and that revision. Added content will be in green and removed content will be in red.

Classic Editor post revisions

Once you find the version you like, hit Restore This Revision.

That revision will become the new draft state for the post or page. You’ll be redirected to the Classic Editor screen. 

As with the Block Editor revisions, this only applies to the content body itself, not any other site settings or configurations. It’s just for undoing content editing changes on that specific post or page.

Method 4. Undoing Changes in WordPress.com

If you have a WordPress.com site instead of self-hosted WordPress, the process for undoing changes is a bit different. WordPress.com has some unique backup and revision capabilities.

For posts and pages, the revision system works the same as the self-hosted block editor. You can browse previous revisions and restore content to an earlier state.

In the WordPress.com post editor, find Revisions.

Open WordPress.com post revisions

In the pop-up, you’ll see all of your changes. To use a specific version, hit Load.

WordPress.com post revisions

WordPress.com also has a way to restore accidentally deleted posts. Go to Posts » Trashed. Locate the right one and select Restore.

Restore WordPress.com post

You can also use plugins like Jetpack to restore your entire site. 

Method 5. Undoing Changes in a Contact Form

You might also need to roll back other features on your site, like your contact form. If you accidentally delete important fields or break the entire form, you can undo these changes.

WPForms is a contact form with a built-in revisions feature. Every time you save a form, it’ll back up your new changes. Then, you can view the revision history and restore an old version if you need to. 

WPForms plugin

In the form editor, click on the button in the bottom left corner.

WPForms revisions

Here, you’ll see previews of all the earlier versions of the form. Select an old version before the error and click on Restore this version.

WPForms restore revision

This way, you don’t have to fully recreate forms from scratch after unintended edits.

FAQs About Undoing Changes in WordPress

Can I undo an update in WordPress?

Yes, you can undo a WordPress update. All you’ll need to do is find a backup that was created before the update. If you’re using a backup plugin like Duplicator, it’ll tell you the WordPress version for each backup. 

Duplicator backup WordPress version

Once you find the right backup, restore it! This instantly replaces the current version of WordPress with the older version.

How do I undo a page edit in WordPress?

To undo changes made when editing a specific WordPress page, you have two options:

  1. Use the Revisions feature to browse previous versions of the page content and restore an earlier revision, following the process outlined earlier.
  2. Restore your full site from a backup taken before the page edits were made.

The revisions method is quicker for just undoing text changes. But restoring a backup ensures you revert any other settings changed at the same time.

How do I see changes in WordPress history?

WordPress has a revisions feature that keeps track of changes made to posts, pages, custom post types, and other content. You can also use plugins like Melapress File Monitor to track when files, plugins, themes, and other site components are edited. 

If you need an audit of every single change on your WordPress dashboard, WP Activity Log records and displays all user activity across your site.

Where are WordPress revisions stored?

Post and page revisions in WordPress are stored in the wp_posts and wp_postmeta tables in your WordPress database. The wp_posts table contains the full text content for each new revision created. Metadata about those revisions is stored in wp_postmeta.

How do I limit WordPress post revisions?

To limit WordPress post revisions, you’ll need to open your site’s public_html directory in an FTP client or cPanel. Open the wp-config.php file and add the following code:

define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 5);

Feel free to change ‘5’ to the number of post revisions you’re allowing on your site. 

After you save changes to your wp-config.php file, you won’t have to deal with a disorganized post revisions interface. Old revisions will be deleted after they exceed your custom limit. 

Conclusion

Having the ability to undo changes in WordPress can be a real lifesaver. From restoring backups to reverting post revisions, you now have multiple methods for quickly recovering your site.

While you’re here, I think you’ll like these extra WordPress tutorials:

Do you want to quickly undo any change in WordPress? Use Duplicator Pro to roll back your site in one click!

author avatar
Joella Dunn Content Writer
Joella is a writer with years of experience in WordPress. At Duplicator, she specializes in site maintenance — from basic backups to large-scale migrations. Her ultimate goal is to make sure your WordPress website is safe and ready for growth.

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