How to Restore a Previous Version of a Post

Prefer reading? Click for transcript.(Text on screen): WordHer, with Barbara J. Feldman, http://www.WordHer.com

Barbara J. Feldman: Hi. Barbara Feldman of WordHer.com, here to demonstrate how to restore a previous version of a post.

Don’t you sometimes wish you had a time machine that would actually allow you to roll back your mistakes?

Well, when it comes to editing WordPress posts and pages, WordPress comes with a built-in time machine that gives you the power to restore a previous version of any post or page.

I’m going to demonstrate today with this post about kitties.

I have filled this post with ipsum lorem from CatIpsum.com. If you want to create your own nonsense content, you can do that at CatIpsum.com.

So, here is our kitty post and our content and this is what it looks like in the editor.

So, I want to show you a few features that maybe you’ve overlooked.

In the right-hand column, if you’re using a two-column display for your WordPress editor, you will see the number of revisions that you have made to this post.

A revision is every time you have hit Publish or Update or Save Draft. Each of those is a revision.

And as you make changes and you Update, you will see your revision counter increase. And now it’s at seven.

Another place that you will see revisions on your edit screen is under Screen Options, if you have selected revisions, you will also see a listing of each revision, by time, listed after your editor.

So, here are all my seven revisions from a minute ago to 39 minutes ago.

So, what happens if we hit a big, fat Delete and we’re not watching what we’re doing and we hit and Update? Now we have eight revisions to compare to.

But we have lost a bunch of content. We don’t remember where that content came from. We can’t rewrite it. We are in a tizzy. What are we going to do?

We’re going to use WordPress built-in revision editor.

So, there are several ways to get to where we want to go.

First, I’m going to show you Browse on your eight revisions.

Now, when I first saw this screen, I had a hard time understanding it, which is why I made this video for you.

So, you’re going to see two posts.

The newer one is going to be on the right and the older one is going to be on the left.

Things that have been added are going to be marked in green and things that have been deleted are going to be marked in red.

You will notice that over here there is a Restore This Revision button, but at this point, I can’t click it.

That’s because when you first open up this revision editor, your current version is going to be on the right-hand side. So, you can’t restore what is already published.

Another thing I want you to notice is that it’s going to give you the time stamp. It’s going to be on the left-hand side. But the time stamp refers to the content that’s on the right.

So, in our case, this is the most current version. And what we have here is the one revision before that.

What we see here is that between these two revisions, a lot has been deleted.

Now, I want you to look at the slider. This slider is gonna take you back through time. A minute ago, 23 minutes ago, 30 minutes ago.

What does this mean? So, 30 minutes ago; remember I told you the time stamp here is always for the right-hand column.

How to Restore a Previous Version of a Post

If this is the revision you want to restore, if it’s the revision showing on the right-hand side, you click the blue Restore This Revision.

So, you can slide all the way back until the very first revision as everybody’s very first revision is going to be completely blank.

So, this was the first content that I put into this post. The blank page. The very first Save, Update, or Publish that I did is gonna be here on the right.

So, now we’re going forward through time to the version that’s currently published. And if we go back in time once. . .

Now, we can do this with the slider. We can also do it with the Previous button. Previous, Previous, Next, Next, Next.

So, the delete that I made was just one revision before.

So, now we have, from a minute ago, we have all the content that we deleted by mistake is here. And I’m going to restore this revision.

But before I do, I want to go back and show you: This is the mistake page. OK? This is the mistake that we made.

We had some content here and it just, right in the middle of a sentence, we started and there’s some missing content here. So, this is what’s currently published.

This is one revision back. It’s on the right-hand side.

So, we could restore this revision. But before I do that, I want to show you one more feature. And that is compare any two revisions.

I just explained, I think a couple of times, that you’re only going to see side-by-side the one previous to whatever time frame you’re looking at. You’re gonna also see the one previous.

This feature automatically gives us two arrow sliders on our timeline, and we can now compare any two revisions.

So, we can make the right column our currently published version and we can compare that to 39 minutes ago.

And now it does give us a time stamp for both columns.

Left is the From; 39 minutes ago. And right is the To; it’s one minute ago. It’s the content that is currently published.

So, if we use our two revisions to compare what’s currently there to another timeframe, this is how we can easily do it, using Compare Two Revisions.

But now, if we want to restore this from 30 minutes ago, we need to move it to the right-hand column.

The only way to do that is to move the right arrow to the revision that we want so it’s in this column.

But in order to get this revision in the right hand column, in order to restore the revision that I wanted, that was before in the left-hand column; the right-hand column, it has to be with the right arrow buttons.

This makes it a little bit easier. This time stamp, right-hand column, Restore This Revision.

But what I wanted to show you was just one revision ago.

So, that’s the one that’s going to give us back our missing words and so we are now finally going to Restore This Revision.

Now, it pops me into the editor. In the editor I can see the half a paragraph that I deleted has now been restored.

And if I look at it in the browser, I’ll also see the missing text has been restored.

I hope you have found this helpful and that you now know how to use WordPress’ amazing time machine to restore your lost posts and pages.

If you’re not viewing this on WordHer.com, please jump on over to www.WordHer.com and sign up for my newsletter where I will send you new tips and video tutorials so you can get to know WordPress better.

Thank you for listening.

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