While creating a new WordPress site we might have come across the need to set up a local installation of WordPress on our computer. We have already discussed how to set up WordPress locally using Instant WordPress, Xampp and DesktopServer. The local installation helps us a lot to test themes, plugins and code customizations without the risk of breaking our live website. It is often necessary to create bulk posts in local installations to check the compatibility of our themes or plugins while handling large quantities of data.
In the initial stages of site development, we may also try out different themes and plugins in the live environment itself. Although the use of a staging environment is highly recommended in such scenarios, we may use the live website for testing. After all the testing is complete we need to revert our changes and reset the WordPress installation to the default one in our local machine or live server.
We might often do this by deleting the existing installation and starting with a new one. This is not essential as we can easily reset our existing website to the default one without deleting the installation. In this tutorial, I will explain the step by step process to reset a WordPress installation to the default one.
Step1: First of all let us first see our website, dashboard, and database before starting the reset process. I am using my local WordPress installation for the demo purpose. The reset process in our live server or staging environment is exactly similar as in a local installation.
We have 2004 posts, 8 pages, and 1 comment. We are using the Ultimate Blogger free theme and our database is 3.2 MB in size.
Step2: Install and activate the Advanced WP Reset plugin.
Step3: Now go to Advanced WP Reset plugin options under the settings tab in the dashboard.
In the options page, we have to enter the text ‘reset’ and click the Reset Database button.
Step4: In the next screen we can view several warning messages. There is no need to worry about these and we can safely ignore them.
In the bottom part after the warning messages, again we have to enter ‘reset’ text and click the Reset database button.
That is all we have to do. Now let us go back to the admin dashboard and see the summary.
All the previous 2000+ posts are deleted and now we have just the default ‘hello world’ post.
Step5: Now let us go to the plugin section in the dashboard.
The process will deactivate all plugins except Advanced WP Reset. This reset will also delete all customizations made to the database by the different plugins. As I have mentioned before, we were using the Ultimate Blogger free theme before reset. Let us now go to the home page of our bog. We can see that the theme has changed to the default Twenty Seventeen theme.
Just like the case of plugins, this reset process will not delete any themes. Now let us see our database.
The size of the database is now just 768 KB. This plugin will delete all the existing users. The reset process will recreate the admin user alone with the existing credentials. Thus we have created a new WordPress default installation in less than 5 minutes without actually going through the installation process again.
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