If have a WordPress installation for testing purposes, or just want to set up your blog again from scratch, you may be wondering how you can reset your website to the original default settings.
Resetting your website can be useful if you are testing new plugins and themes, or just want to “have a play” and return your site to how it was when you first installed it.
Rather than deleting your installation and re-installing WordPress, which can take time and effort, there’s an easier solution: hitting the reset button.
Note: This solution is best suited to standalone WordPress websites, notMultisite installations.
If you’re still having trouble resetting your site after reading this post, let us help! Our awesome support team can help you with any WordPress issue, big or small – and for free! It doesn’t matter what time it is or whether it’s the weekend, our team is available 24/7.
Resetting Your Site With WordPress Database Reset
WordPress Database Reset is a free plugin available in the WordPress Plugin Directory that lets you reset your database back to its defaults.
Since your database contains all of your website’s information and customizations, this means your site will completely wiped of all its content and you will be left with a fresh install, just as if you had installed WordPress for the first time.
To get started, download, install and activate the plugin. It will add a new menu item to the admin sidebar, Tools > Database Reset.
Select the tables you would like to reset, or click Select All to completely reset your site.
Choosing individual tables lets you delete specific content, such as your comments, all of your pages, or all of the users on your site (except the admin, of course).
When you “Select All,” the plugin will display a checkbox asking if you would like to reactivate your current theme and plugins after the reset. If you to keep your theme and plugins, check this box, otherwise leave it unchecked.
Next, type the supplied security code into the text field, in this case “c140a,” and click Reset Tables. You will be returned to the WordPress dashboard with all of your settings back to their defaults.
The plugin will then display a prompt asking if you’re sure you want to continue. Click OK.
You will then be returned to the WordPress dashboard with all of your tables wiped and your website’s settings back to their defaults. It will be like you just installed WordPress!
WordPress Database Reset is a great plugin to have installed if you frequently need to reset your site and don’t want to go through the WordPress 5-minute installation process each time. The plugin is extremely quick and simple to use.
Hitting Reset with Upfront
If you’re using an Upfront theme (Haven’t heard of Upfront? Check it out for free!), you can reset your theme or even reset individual page layout. So if you’ve started making changes to your theme but it doesn’t look quite right and you want to start again, just go to Upfront > General and hit the big red “Reset Theme” button.
Warning: Use this feature with caution since you won’t be able to recover your changes!
If you’ve changed the layout of a particular page and want to start over, you can also reset your layout and start again from the Upfront > Generalsettings page. And if you’ve just updated Upfront core, you can reset the Upfront cache from the admin area, too.
Advanced Features
For advanced users, such as plugin and theme developers, you can use this plugin with WordPress CLI, a command line interface for WordPress.
If you have WordPress CLI installed, you can reset the database using the following command line:
wp reset database
You can even specify a list of tables to reset:
wp reset database --tables='users, posts, comments, options'
For the full documentation on how to use WordPress CLI with WordPress Database Reset, check out the GitHub repository.
Lastly, it’s worth emphasizing again that this plugin deletes all of the content on your website (if you select all tables) so only use it if you want to completely remove all of your content.
