How To Roll Back WordPress Themes & Plugins To Previous Version With WP Rollback?

WordPress, its themes and plugins have often updates. Which is good. But sometimes those updates can break down your site. There are various problems that can occur and solutions that may work. But what if nothing helps and you need site to be live ASAP?

In that case you will maybe want to roll back WordPress to its previous version. Or maybe even roll back WordPress plugin update or theme update.

Just for a while until you find solution to problem or developer releases fix. While it’s considered best practice to always keep your WordPress plugins and themes updated, there are times you may need to quickly revert to a previous version.

That is why it is good practise to do regular backups. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to return to a previous version that worked so well? Luckily WordPress community is huge and plugin repository amazing. There is free way to undo changes on WordPress site.

 

How To Roll Back WordPress Themes And Plugins To Previous Version?

WP Rollback is a free plugin you can download from the WordPress plugin repository. The plugin is very easy to use. It makes possible to quickly rollback any theme or plugin from WordPress.org to any previous version.

Works just like the plugin updater, except you’re rolling back (or forward) to a specific version. No need for manually downloading and FTPing the files. You just need to select the version of the plugin or theme that you’d like to rollback and in a few moments you’ll be using the version requested.

 

How-To-Roll-Back-WordPress

 

Undo Changes In WordPress With WP Rollback

The first thing you need to do is install the WP Rollback plugin.

Installation is very easy:

  • Login to your WordPress dashboard
  • Navigate to the Plugins menu and click Add New
  • In the search field type “WP Rollback” and click Search Plugins
  • Once you found WP Rollback, simply click “Install Now”

When WP Rollback is installed, it adds a rollback link for each plugin and themes installed from WordPress.org.

WP Rollback was designed to use WordPress’ native updater class to give end users the ability to activate any publicly available version from the WordPress Plugin or Theme Directory. That it will not work with premium themes or plugins.

 

how-to-undo-changes-in-wordpress

 

If you click on the Rollback link for plugins or themes, you will be taken to a screen where you can select from a list of previous versions or update to newer ones.

 

how-to-roll-back-wordpress-theme-update

 

Choose which version you want to revert to or update to a newer version if it’s in the list.

 

wordpress-roll-back-version

 

Confirm and hit the Rollback button. That’s basically is all! Support is available at WordPress.org support forum. If you ran into any problem or just want to read the documentation you can do it on the plugin Github Wiki.

 

WordPress Roll Back Update Manually

WordPress doesn’t have built-in feature to roll back a theme or plugin to its previous version like you are able to do with post revisions.

You can revert WordPress version by downgrading it to its previous working version. Go to WordPress and look for an earlier version. Download a zip file of the rollback you want.

Locate the files that you have downloaded on your computer and unzip the files. Then login to your FTP client.  Locate your root site. Usually it is in the public-HTML folder.  The goal is to locate your WordPress files. 

You will know you’re in the right directory when you see the folders wp-admin, wp-include, wp-content, etc. What you’re going to want to do is copy all the files except the wp-content folder (first deactivate all plugins just in case).

It might take a number of minutes to transfer all the data. A little message should pop-up asking you if you want to overwrite the files. Hopefully, this will solve whatever problem you might have been having.

 

Roll Back WordPress Plugin and Theme Updates – Final Words

If you work with WordPress, you’ve come across those times when a new update does something unexpected and unwanted to your site.

WP Rollback is completely safe plugin. It takes publicly available versions of the plugins you already have on your site and installs the version that you choose.

WP Rollback only works with plugins or themes installed from the WordPress Repository. If you don’t see the rollback link, then most likely that plugin or theme is not found on WordPress.org.

This plugin does not support plugins from Github, ThemeForest, Codecanyon or other sources other than the WordPress.org.

In my opinion, WP Rollback is a really great solution to rollback or roll forward your WordPress plugin or themes versions if something unpredictable or unwanted happens.

It is simple to use and you don’t need any extensive knowledge to work with it. Just click on the Rollback link, select the version and click the Rollback button. You’re done. And if you need to reset part of WordPress site or whole site, then you can use WP Reset plugin.


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7 thoughts on “How To Roll Back WordPress Themes & Plugins To Previous Version With WP Rollback?”

  1. Doesn’t work with the basic Twenty Ten Theme, Generates error: The link you followed has expired.

  2. hey, there

    i first updated theme and lost the site

    now if i install the rollback, i am not able to see the rollback button on the theme detail page in wp.

    please help.

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