We’ve found that restarting a WordPress site can be incredibly helpful in many situations. Whether you’re testing themes and plugins, working on a demo site, or starting fresh, a reset can save you a lot of time and effort.
Resetting your site restores everything to its default settings, allowing you to start over without the hassle of manual changes.
Over the years, we’ve used quick reset tools for troubleshooting, staging sites, and clearing out experiments. These tools make the process much faster and easier.
In this guide, we’ll show you the easiest way to restart or reset your WordPress site. Follow these steps to get back to a clean slate in no time.
Why Restart a WordPress Site?
Restarting or resetting a WordPress site is like restoring your phone to its default “factory settings.” It wipes out all changes, letting you start fresh with a clean slate.
This process removes all your customizations, plugins, and themes, giving you a blank canvas to rebuild your site.
Here are some common situations where restarting or resetting a WordPress site can be helpful:
1. You’re using a demo site on your own computer. If you’ve set up WordPress on localhost, resetting it after moving the site to a live server can save time. We’ve done this ourselves while testing themes and plugins. Resetting quarterly ensures a fresh start for every project.
2. You’ve been working on a new site and want to start over. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, a site’s redesign or customization doesn’t work out. Instead of undoing everything, resetting WordPress is a faster way to start fresh. It’s a trick we’ve used often when redesigning our test sites.
3. You’re going to rework a client’s website. Starting from scratch is often the best approach if a client wants a completely new look and feel. We’ve used this method on staging servers to speed up redesigns and deliver results faster.
4. You’re learning about WordPress hands-on. Resetting WordPress can be invaluable when experimenting with starter themes or building your own plugins and themes. We’ve relied on fresh installations to practice and perfect our skills.
Tip: Starting a new WordPress site? Check out WPBeginner’s WordPress Website Design service. For an affordable fee, our expert team can set up a unique and professional website, designed for your specific needs.
How to Restart and Reset a WordPress Site
Restarting your WordPress site might sound difficult, but it’s really not.
We’re going to walk you through the entire reset process step by step.
Before you begin, it’s important to create a full backup of your site using a WordPress backup plugin. This is important in case you want to restore your site from the backup after restarting it.
We recommend using Duplicator for backups. It allows you to easily create on-demand backups that you can use to restore your website with one click.
We use Duplicator on all our websites, both live sites and staging/development sites. For more details, see our Duplicator review.
Restart Your WordPress Site with Advanced WordPress Reset
First, you’ll need to install and activate the Advanced WordPress Reset plugin. For more details, see our instructions on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Once the plugin is activated, you need to go to Tools » Advanced WP Reset in your WordPress dashboard. Here, you can restart your WordPress website by simply typing ‘reset’ into the Reset database field.
Once you’ve entered the text, simply click the ‘Reset database’ button.
When you reset your website, your plugins and theme files are not deleted. However, all the plugins are deactivated except for Advanced WordPress Reset.
After restarting your website, you can manually activate each plugin. Simply go to the Plugins » Installed Plugins page from your WordPress dashboard and click the ‘Activate’ link under the plugin name.
Configuring Custom Reset Options in Advanced WordPress Reset
Aside from restarting your entire website, Advanced WordPress Reset also lets you reset specific items on your website, like comments, or clean the uploads folder.
To reset individual files, you can go to Tools » Advanced WP Reset from your WordPress admin panel and then open the ‘Custom reset’ tab.
Next, you can click the ‘Run reset now’ button to restart different items on your website.
For example, if you used multiple plugins or themes for testing and now want a clean start, you can delete them all. Similarly, you can clean the uploads folder and wp-content folder.
The plugin also gives you different options to reset comments on your site. Simply scroll down to the ‘Reset Comments’ section in the plugin settings.
Here, you can delete all the comments, pending comments, spam comments, trashed comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks with a single click.
If you are unsure about which settings to choose, we recommend leaving these settings as is and using the default reset options instead.
This helps save time from deleting individual comments, and you get a fresh start on your WordPress site.
Video Tutorial
We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to reset a WordPress site the quick way. You might also like our ultimate guide to speeding up WordPress and our pick of the best plugins and tips to customize WordPress admin.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Olaf
Sometimes I need to restart WordPress when working on a client’s website that someone else has previously managed. I’ve been doing it completely differently all this time. Not that my method wasn’t functional, but it’s more time-consuming. Next time I need to do this, I’ll definitely try your approach.
Jiří Vaněk
Sometimes I only delete all tables from database. Then, after calling the domain in browser, a new installation will take place. This easy steps get my website to default state as well.
Annissa
Hello
I was successful with the entire thing…except now I can’t get into WordPress. It doesn’t recognize my email. I think I signed up through Bluehost, that’s how I normally login, but when I try that it just takes me back to WordPress login. I can’t reset my password because it doesn’t even recognize my email. Any suggestions?
WPBeginner Support
You can force add an admin user to allow you to log in following our guide below:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-add-an-admin-user-in-wordpress-using-ftp/
Admin
Russell
You can also go into Cpanel > WordPress management > Manage Users > update password for you or anyone else or add a new user.
Tonia Brauer
Ciao! I just attempted to reset my website. However, just as happened to Steve (comment from 2021), when I try to log back in it says my email is not registered on the site. How can I resolve this? Best, Tonia
WPBeginner Support
If the plugin does not set up your user correctly, you can forcefully add a new user following our guide below!
https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-add-an-admin-user-in-wordpress-using-ftp/
Admin
Steve
I reset my website and it kicked me out, and when I tried logging in again it says my email is not registered on the site. Did the reset delete my account information? How do I get it back if I cant log in to my website?
karl
can i reset WP without affecting the users??
WPBeginner Support
Sadly, you would need to manually reset the content or find a different tool to keep the users.
Admin
Faisal
Thanks for super easy tip
WPBeginner Support
Glad you found our guide helpful
Admin
Daniela Kemeny
Thank you for this it was great and worked perfectly. I want to restore the blog posts ONLY, not the theme, not the plugins, and nothing else from the database, only the blog posts. When resorting the database, it restores everything and the website goes back to what it was like before the reset. Is there a way to bring pack the blog posts only?
thank you!
WPBeginner Support
You would need to have a backup of the posts to restore for what you’re wanting to do if you use this method.
Admin
Vi
Hi! i’ve reset my wordpress but my home page did not reset, it’s still my latest homepage. do you know why?
WPBeginner Support
It would depend on what you reset but the most likely culprit would be if your site has caching enabled that would be showing the old page.
Admin
Jake
I am getting a 500 internal error on my admin page, my website doesn’t work any longer, and I can not log into my dashboard AT ALL to attempt to fix any of this.
WPBeginner Support
For that error, you would want to take a look at our article below:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-fix-the-internal-server-error-in-wordpress/
Admin
Fawad Khan
Salam!
How can I change WP dashboard to old layout?
WPBeginner Support
This plugin should set your site to the default WordPress dashboard layout.
Admin
Ayesha
Hi, if I do this do I keep my domain and blog name? Thanks!
WPBeginner Support
Yes, the blog url would stay the same.
Admin
Max
Hey. Thanks for the article. I reset my website and after that all options of editing it in dashboard dissapeared and i can’t do anything with the website now. I used a plugin to reset it. Do you know what can be done about it?
WPBeginner Support
If something like that happened, then you may want to reinstall WordPress or go through our troubleshooting guide below:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/beginners-guide-to-troubleshooting-wordpress-errors-step-by-step/
Admin
Wudil
I have problem with my plugins. will resetting help to solve the problem please.
WPBeginner Support
It would depend on the issue, we would first recommend following the steps in our article below:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/beginners-guide-to-troubleshooting-wordpress-errors-step-by-step/
Admin
Stephen
There is no “website reset” on the Tool dashboard. Could there have been changes on the plugin or does this article need some updating?
WPBeginner Support
This plugin should still currently be working, you may want to ensure the plugin is active and you are an admin user on your site.
Admin
Anil
I have issue with images not loading in media gallery. I have tried resetting the file permissions using your blog, deactivating themes and plugins, changing hyperlinks as well, but problem persists. Will resetting the WordPress help??? Or is there any other way?? Please help
WPBeginner Support
You would want to reach out to your hosting provider, resetting your site would remove all of your content.
Admin
Dave Roeser
What a timely article. Thanks. I am new to WP (I did spend 40+ years as a mainframe systems programmer) and my encore career involves developing Adwords scripts for a small marketing company.
We want to completely blow the site away and start from the beginning. I have downloaded the images and content he wants to save.
What is the best way (or a best way) to delete everything (including the database) so we have a blank slate to start anew?
Thanks,
Dave
WPBeginner Support
You would follow this article
Admin
Sonia Isotov
A friend of mine is having a heck of a time reestting the site-wide font. I’ve found your video on this but that didn’t help. He’s using a template he bought and can’t seem to be able to figure this out. It’s set to 12 and he wants 18 as the default. Any tips? thanks so much, Sonia
WPBeginner Support
That would require changing your site’s CSS rather than resetting the site. You would want to take a look at our guide below:
https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-change-the-font-size-in-wordpress/
Admin