HOW TO RESTART A WordPress SITE – RESET WordPress (THE FAST WAY)
Do you want to know how to reset your WordPress Website?
By resetting your website, you may easily get back to the default WordPress settings. When utilizing a demo site to test multiple plugins and themes and wish to undo your changes, it can be quite handy and useful.
In this blog post, we’ll show you how to restart or reset your WordPress site, fast and easy.
Why Restart a WordPress Site?
You can return WordPress to its default settings by restarting it or resetting it. Consider it as being similar to the process of returning your phone to its “factory settings”.
It will delete all your apps and customizations, so you can start over fresh.
You might want to restart or reset a WordPress site in the following situations:
1. On your computer, you are accessing a demo site.
If you’ve built your site on localhost and are now ready to transfer it to a live server, you may find it necessary to delete your WordPress installation on localhost and start fresh. If you are a developer who routinely tests new themes and plugins on your local installation, it may be worthwhile to wipe everything and start fresh every three months.
2. You want to start over after working on a new website.
Perhaps you’ve been busy building a website or blog, but you don’t like the customizations. You may rapidly start again with a fresh design by simply resetting WordPress rather than completely erasing everything.
3. You’ll redesign a client’s website.
You may need to start over with WordPress on the staging server if they request anything drastically different from what is already available.
4. You’re getting hands-on WordPress training.
Perhaps you’ve experimented with a starting theme or tried your hand at creating your own plugins or themes. Consider starting over with a new WordPress installation.
When Not to Reset Your WordPress Site
There are a few other reasons why you would want to avoid restoring your WordPress site to its factory configuration. Pressing the reset button is not always the best solution.
You Want to Redesign Part of Your Site
Resetting WordPress makes sense if you want to entirely revamp a website. However, a reset won’t work if you wish to remodel a specific area of your website.
Imagine you only want to change your theme. If so, you should still maintain your existing content, plugins, and settings rather than starting from scratch. Instead of resetting WordPress in this instance and for the majority of redesigns, you should optimize your current content, implement some redirects, and update your XML sitemap.
You wish to move your website
Let’s imagine you want to alter the architecture of your website rather than just the design. You could want to transfer your website, for instance, to a new server, CMS, or domain. You wouldn’t reset WordPress in such a situation. Likewise, you would move your site instead. Even if the specific procedures of a website migration can vary, a WordPress plugin can make things easier. For instance, you can clone your site and duplicate it on a different hosting server using the Duplicator plugin.
How to Restart and Reset a WordPress Site
Although restarting your WordPress site could seem challenging, it’s really not.
We’ll take you step by step through the complete reset procedure.
First thing first ! Run a complete backup of your website using a WordPress backup plugin (we recommend the Updraft Backup Plugin) before you start. Better hosting providers do offer to create a snapshot—if this is the case, make use of it, too. This is crucial in the event that you want to restart your site and then restore it from a backup. It is always better be safe than sorry.
Restart Your WordPress Site with Advanced WordPress Reset
You can now proceed to restart your WordPress site with a WordPress Plugin. For this blog post, we’ll be utilizing the Advanced WordPress Reset WP Reset plugin as an example.
First, you’ll need to install and activate the Advanced WordPress Reset plugin.
Once the plugin is activated, you need to go to Tools » Advanced WP Reset in your WordPress dashboard. You will be displayed a huge popup with promotion for the paid version of this plugin. You can simply ignore them and scroll down to the bottom of the page.
Here, you can restart your WordPress website by simply typing ‘reset’ in the Site Reset field.
If you are not totally sure it is a good idea to create a snapshot before – just hit the “Create Snapshot” button.
Once you’ve entered the text “reset”, simply click the ‘Reset site’ button.
Please note that when you reset your website plugins and theme files are not deleted as well. Anyway, all plugins are deactivated except for our Advanced WordPress Reset Plugin.
If you wish, you can start to manually activate your plugins one by one after restarting your website. You just need to go to the Plugins » Installed Plugins page from your WordPress dashboard and click the ‘Activate’ link for each plugin.
If you want to delete themes:
WP Reset > Tools > Delete themes. Next, click Delete all themes and confirm the pop-up.
Configuring Custom Reset Options in Advanced WordPress Reset
You may use Advanced WordPress Reset not only to reset your entire site, but also to reset individual elements, such as comments or the uploads folder.
Select Tools » Advanced WP Reset in your WordPress dashboard, and then click the ‘Custom rest’ tab to reset specific files.
Next, you can click the ‘Run reset now’ button to restart different items on your website.
You can erase all the plugins and themes, for instance, if you tested many plugins or themes and now wish to start fresh. You can also tidy up the uploads and wp-content folders.
You have a variety of options to reset comments on your website with the paid pro edition of the plugin. Simply navigate to the ‘Reset Comments’ section in the plugin settings by scrolling down.
You can delete all comments, pending comments, spam comments, trashed comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks et cetera et cetera with a single click.
Reset WordPress without a reset plugin
Here are the steps when you want to reset WordPress without a reset plugin:
1. Log in to cPanel from your hosting client portal.
2. Scroll to Databases and click MySQL Databases.
3. Identify your site’s database and click the Delete option under the Actions tab. This will delete your MySQL Database.
4. Scroll down to “Create a New MySQL Database” section.
5. Name your new database and click Create Database. The page should refresh automatically.
6. Next, scroll to the Add a User to a Database section. Select your previous username (with all its previous permissions) and newly created database from the dropdown menus.
7. Click Add.
8. Now go to File Manager in cPanel.
9. Click the public_html folder.
10. Select the wp-content folder and delete it. This will delete your plugin and theme files.
Your website is about to undergo a comprehensive reset, but you are not quite finished yet. You will need to rerun the WordPress installation procedure in order to bring functionality back to your website.
Reinstall WordPress
1. In the browser’s address bar, type in your domain name and add /wp-admin/install.php (the WordPress installation script) to the end.
2. Fill in the form with the required information, including your site title and username.
Click Install WordPress when you’ve filled out the entire form.
4. You’ll be prompted to log in with a WordPress admin username and password.
That wraps it up! Your website will be reinstalled from the ground up – an entire WordPress installation. You are now able to construct an entirely new website with a new WordPress Database, new site settings, fresh theme, plugins, content, and configuration options.
We hope this tutorial was helpful in teaching you how to quickly reset a WordPress site.