Most of us make mistakes at least once or twice when working on our website. Luckily, there are ways to reverse what we’ve done. In this guide, we will show you the various methods you can use to undo the changes you make to your website.
In this guide
As you are adding text, images, and other content while editing your site, you’ll find undo and redo buttons in the top left corner of the editor screen. These are shown as a backward arrow for undoing a change and a forward arrow for redoing that change:
To undo the most recent action that you’ve taken, click the undo button once. If needed, you can click it again to undo the action before that, and so on.
As an alternative to the undo/redo buttons, you can also use keyboard shortcuts to undo and redo changes:
- Windows: Ctrl + Z to undo changes and Ctrl + Y to redo changes.
- macOS: Cmd + Z to undo changes and Cmd + Shift + Z to redo changes.
The key thing to understand with both of these methods is that they only work for changes that you just made in your current editing session.
If you want to revert to changes from a longer time period (e.g., a previous writing/editing session), use the WordPress revision system described in the next section.
When working on your pages and posts, your work is autosaved. Previous versions of your pages and posts are saved in case you need to revert to an earlier version.
To recover an earlier version of a page or post:
- From your dashboard, click on Pages or Posts.
- Click on the title of the page or post to edit it.
- In the settings on the right, click on Revisions.
- This will show you all previously saved versions of the page or post. Browse through the previously saved and click the Load button to load a previous version of the content.
If you accidentally deleted a piece of content (such as a page or post) you didn’t want to delete, you can restore it from the Trash/ Bin.
Here’s how to access your deleted content and restore something you accidentally deleted:
- From your dashboard, click on Pages or Posts.
- Navigate to the Trashed tab.
- Click the three-dot icon next to the post that you want to restore.
- Select Restore from the drop-down.
Once you do that, that page or post will reappear as a draft. To make it live on your site again, edit and click the Publish button.
This section of the guide applies to sites with the WordPress.com Creator or Entrepreneur plan. If your site has one of our legacy plans, this feature is available on the Pro plan.
When you introduce third-party code to your site (usually in plugins), your site can benefit from extra protection. That’s why we provide backups and restores to all WordPress.com sites with plugins and third-party themes installed.
To view your backups, go to your dashboard and click on Jetpack → Backup. Backups are taken once per day and often multiple times a day if you are making a lot of changes on the site. You can also visit Jetpack → Activity Log to see a list of actions taken on your site and restore a backup from there.
When you restore a backup, it will make your site appear exactly how it was at that point in time.
