People starting out blogging will inevitably make mistakes in the early days, but the most important thing is knowing how to correct and reverse them. Is there a way to reverse the last thing you just did in WordPress editor?
There is indeed a quick way to do this.
To undo something, press Ctrl + Z on the keyboard and this will undo the last action you just did. This is useful for the common things that happen like deleting paragraphs and images by accident, and this feature will undo that and restore the item/text that was deleted.
The WordPress interface can be annoying to begin with in this way, where you will may find with laptops and notebooks especially you accidentally highlight or move certain images or blocks of text and then accidentally delete or edit them in a way you didn’t want to. Ctrl + Z allows you to rewind 10 seconds and pretend it never happened!
If you need to undo more things and go further back there are some other options available. Let’s look at these in more detail below.
How To Revert To a Previous Version of a Site
The new version of WordPress has a powerful autosave feature that automatically saves changes to posts and pages every 60 seconds, allowing for you to go back to previos versions very quickly.
What if you need to go further back than one step to a previous version of a page in the Classic Editor, returning the contents to what they were before? The video below shows you how to do this. It basically involves enabling and using the Revisions feature in the WordPress editor.
The general steps are as follows:
- Go to screen options in the top right corner.
- Make sure the Revisions box is checked.
- When revisions are turned on, you will see previous versions of the page at the bottom, including date and time modified.
- Select a previous version to revert back to it and undo any mistakes made since then. You will see the difference between it and the current version on the screen.
It Is Important to Backup Your WordPress Site
In spite of all these handy revision and autosave features built into WordPress, it is still very important in a broader sense to back up your WordPress website. Serious mistakes and catastrophies can still happen and people can lose months of work on their site. Such horror stories do exist.
Any good host will also keep regular backups of a site on their servers, and if you phone them they will often be able to revert your site back to what it was yesterday or the day before to undo any catastrophies. However it is best not to rely on just this and also keep local backups of your site yourself.
Plugins and updates can wreak havoc and cause images and other features on a site to break. Hackers can also break into a site and install malware that takes the site down or else deletes all the content. Therefore having a strong password for your WordPress site and backing up regularly is still important.
Periodically and before you implement any major change to your site, such as changing theme or updating to a new version of WordPress, it is very important to back up your site just to stay on the safe side. There are a number of tools to do this, but one of the best free options available is UpdraftPlus.
This is a fantastic tool, the free version of which will offer everything most people need to backup your website. A premium version is available with more features. It can be downloaded and installed throught the Plugins section of your WordPress dashboard.
See our article for more information on backing up your site using the UpdraftPlus plugin.
