HOW TO RESET YOUR WORDPRESS WEBSITE

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.

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.

The WordPress Database Reset plugin will delete ALL of the content on your site.

Select the tables you would like to reset, or click Select All to completely reset your site.

Click Select All will delete everything on your website.

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.

In case you accidentally selected tables and then accidentally entered the security code and then accidentally clicked Reset Tables…

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.

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 table 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.

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We hope you’ve found this article helpful and you successfully reset your website! For more handy articles like this one, check out the related posts below or head to our blog homepage. And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for more free tutorials!