How to Restart a WordPress Site – Reset WordPress

September 30. 2020

While usually, users don’t need to restart a WordPress site, this is useful to know in some cases. Let’s see how to reset or restart your WordPress website in a quick and efficient way.

Reasons to Restart a WordPress Site

First of all, let’s see what it means to reset or restart a WordPress site. By doing this, you are simply restoring your WordPress to its default settings. To give you an idea, think of it as reinstalling an operating system on your computer, or restoring your cellphone to factory settings. Hopefully, it’s clear that your customizations will be deleted and that you’ll start with a “clean slate.” Let’s go through some of the reasons to restart your WordPress site.

Demo on a computer

If you’re using a demo site on localhost, on your computer, you probably want to move it to a live server and reset it afterward. In case you test themes and plugins on your local machine, resetting helps keep things fresh every once in a while.

New website

Maybe you want to lose your old customizations and start over with a new site. Instead of undoing one customization by one, you can restart WordPress and start from scratch.

Reworking a Client’s Website

If the client wants a big change, something very different from their current site, you might want to restart a website on a staging server and start from the beginning.

Experimenting with WordPress

If you’re experimenting with WordPress, learning about it, developing plugins, or themes, at some point, you might need to start with over with a clean site.

How to Reset or Restart a WordPress Site

Resetting your WordPress site is not a complicated process. With the use of plugins, this can be done very quickly. First of all, don’t forget to create a backup of your website, in case you want to restore it. A simple WordPress backup plugin will do the job. Then, you can start with the process of restarting your WordPress site.

The Process

Plugins make working with your WordPress site much easier. There are free plugins you can use for resetting a WordPress site, like WP Reset. First of all, you need to install and activate this plugin.

• Once you’re done, go to Tool> WP Reset and find the Site Reset section.
• The next step is to type “reset” in order to confirm the Reset Site command. You’ll still get a pop up that will ask you for additional confirmation.
• After you click on Reset WordPress, you will start the process. You’ll see a message that says the resetting is in progress. After a couple of seconds, the process will be finished.
• On the homepage of your dashboard, you should be able to see a success message from the WP Reset plugin.

And just like that, your website will be restarted.

Restart a WordPress Website Using Optional Functions

Everything we have written above is enough for you to reset your website. However, there’s a chance you might find additional options that the plugin offers to be useful. So, before you restart your website, take a look at these options, and see if you want to use them.

Take a Snapshot

WP Reset plugin allows you to take a snapshot of your website before you reset it. This snapshot is actually a restore point. This way, you’ll be able to see all the changes you’ve made since you took the snapshot. If necessary, you’ll be able to roll back changes. However, keep in mind that the snapshot is not a backup. Even though you took a snapshot, you still need to make a backup of your website, if you want to restore it. Follow these steps in order to take a snapshot:

• Open the plugin and go to the Snapshots tab
• Scroll down and click on the Create Snapshot button
• Enter the name of a brief description for the snapshot
• Click on the Create snapshot button

Delete Themes and Plugins

It’s important to know that by default, this plugin doesn’t delete theme and plugin. It only deactivates them, but files are not deleted. If you want to delete the files, this is the process:

• Go to Tools>WP Reset and choose the Tools tab
• You’ll be able to see Delete Themes and Delete Plugins options
• Click on either of these options and you’ll be scrolled down to the option of your choice
• All it takes now is click on the Delete plugins or Delete all themes
• Confirm your choice
• If you confirm your choice from the previous step, your themes and plugins will be deleted, without a backup
• You’ll see a message saying how many plugins or themes you have deleted

Note that if you delete all your themes, you’ll need to manually install and activate a theme, as your site won’t work without a theme. If you go to Appearance>Themes, you’ll find a screen with this message: “Error: Stylesheet is missing.” After you click on the Add new button, you’ll be able to choose and upload a theme you like.

Restore your Date After Resetting a WordPress site

After resetting your WordPress site, your posts and pages will disappear. Instead of them, all you’ll be able to see is a post with the title “Hello world!” If you need to restore your old data, you need to activate the backup plugin. Then, you can follow the instructions to restore from the created backup. After restoring your site, you can view your restore content by going to Posts>All Posts.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you’ve found this tutorial to be helpful. You can see that it’s not too hard to restart a WordPress website when using a plugin. But, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be careful when doing this, as the consequences can be quite serious. You might lose all your previous work, so make sure you make a backup, in case you find it necessary.