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
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Ask our AI assistantYou can undo and redo recent changes in the WordPress editor with the following steps:
- When adding text, images, and other content while editing your site, locate the undo and redo buttons in the top-left corner of the 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.
- Click the undo button again to undo the action before that, and so on.
- Click the redo button to return a change that you just undid.
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 previous writing/editing session, use the WordPress revision system described in the next section.
When working on a page, post, or template, WordPress saves previous versions of your work in case you need to revert to an earlier version.
To recover an earlier version of a page, post, or template:
- From your site’s dashboard, click on Pages on Posts (or navigate to Editor → Templates for template revisions).
- Click on the title of the content 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 page or post you didn’t want to delete, you can restore it from the trash bin.
Here’s how to access your deleted pages and posts and restore something you accidentally deleted:
- From your dashboard, click on Pages or Posts.
- Navigate to the “Trashed” tab.
- Hover over the page you want to restore and select the “Restore” link.
- The page or post will reappear as a draft. To make it live on your site again, edit it and click the “Publish” button.
The trash/bin option is available for pages and posts. The trash/bin option is not available for other types of content like site templates and template parts.
This section of the guide applies to sites with the WordPress.com Business and Commerce plan, and the legacy Pro plan. If you have a Business plan, make sure to activate it. For sites on the Free, Personal, and Premium plans, upgrade your plan to access this feature.
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 many changes on the site. You can also visit Jetpack → Activity Log to view 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.