How to Quickly Undo Changes in WordPress with Post Revisions

You may have accidentally deleted an entire section of your blog. You may have published your blog post before it was finished.

It is normal to make mistakes when creating anything, and this includes writing online. Imagine a worse scenario: you write something, and it goes wrong. You think that everything you have written is gone forever. It could even end up losing traffic from search engines.

You can go back and undo any changes you have made in WordPress.

If you use WordPress, you can always return to an earlier version of your post. This is true whether or not you are using a premium WordPress theme.

WordPress’s post revisions feature automatically saves a copy of each revision you make. You can restore content in WordPress if you delete something accidentally or want to undo a change.

This post will show you how to undo any changes made to WordPress pages and posts using the post revisions function.

Table of Contents

1. What are post-revisions?
2. Why Should you use post-revisions?
3. How to undo changes in WordPress using post-revisions

• • Open Revisions Interface
  • Select Revision to Restore
  • Restore Revisions

1. WordPress Post Revision Limitations and Removal
2. Frequently asked questions
3. Conclusion

What are post-revisions?

WordPress has an automatic save feature that allows you to edit and go back to a post. Gutenberg editor automatically saves your contribution to the bar every 10 seconds.

This temporary revision also replaces your older post with the updated version. You can go back to any saved modification and easily restore your post.

It will not remove your current version. The old autosaves will be replaced by the new autosaved versions. Every time a user clicks the Save, Update, or Publish button, a new revision is stored in your database.

Why Should you use post-revisions?

You can use this option to see how your post evolved. You can choose from many versions, track the development of your post, evaluate your options, and select the understanding that you think is best.

This feature is useful if you have multiple authors on your WordPress site. Editors can coordinate teams of writers to work simultaneously on an article or story using post-revisions. You can find out who edited a story, what changes were made, etc.

The editor will be able to see which version of the author’s work was changed. It can help you improve the quality of your content by allowing you to see the big picture.

There are many other reasons for using post-revisions.

1. This is a backup system that’s built into WordPress. You may not be aware of the changes that have been made to a blog post since you last edited it. Check the revision history easily to see what’s changed.
2. Revisions in WordPress can also save you from an untidy editor. What happens if someone edits your post to make it look terrible? With the system of post revisions, you can easily roll back an update.
3. You can use it to review your writing style. We don’t have time to proofread. WordPress modifications make it simple to compare side-by-side to verify that all of the changes you made are in place.

You can undo changes in WordPress using the post revisions.

Let’s say that you have written a blog post. You wrote a beautiful post but decided to remove a large part of it because you didn’t need it. You revisit the edited version a few days later and find it unsatisfactory. How do you undo changes made in WordPress?

This is exactly what we’ll be doing in our next section! Let’s now undo the changes made to WordPress.

Open Revisions Interface

You can undo any changes you have made in WordPress by going to the post/page edit screen. WordPress shows the number of changes in the article panel. Clicking on the Revision Edit links will take you to the post revisions page.

Select Revision to Restore

You can choose the revision you wish to see by using the slider at the top of the interface. Slide the scroll bar to see older revisions.

The screen of revisions will show two columns below the slider. The left column is your earlier post, and the right is your latest post.

Highlights the newly added content. highlights the deleted parts. You can see who made the change and when it was made.

WordPress’ default editor configuration displays all revisions in chronological order.

Use the slider to select revisions to compare. This will split the slider and allow you to use the slider tool in order to reach the differences between the two revisions.

Restore the Revisions

To restore an older revision, drag the slider to the desired location and click the Restore this Revision. You may also see Restore this Autosave, depending on whether it’s a revision or autosave.

WordPress will then restore all the current content to the original revision.

You can also copy and manually paste a revision, like in the example below. You can use this if you want to restore a paragraph that you deleted but do not want to remove everything you have contributed.

Bingo! You’re done!

The Limitations of WordPress Post Revisions

WordPress revisions may be a useful feature for undoing changes. Still, the fact that WordPress (by default) stores an unlimited number of revisions means that each revision can cause your database to grow as it adds another row to your WordPress site’s database.

We’ll show you how to turn off WordPress’s post revisions if it’s not necessary.

4.1 Limit Revisions

You’ll need to edit the wp_config.php code in order to limit the number of revisions. Use an FTP Client like FileZilla or cPanel on your hosting account to access the file. The file can be found in the public_html directory.